John McAuliffe’s new book continues to explore a contemporary life whose domestic spaces and routines are lovingly itemized and reassembled: these poems tell stories and find images for ‘soul-making’ in the everyday world of sheds, swimming pools, concert halls, parks, ferry ports, galleries, protest marches, cinemas and street corners.

And The Way In also ranges further into ‘public’ life in a central sequence which brings its reader off the beaten path on a tour of Ireland and England: that sequence, ‘Home, Again’, combines autobiography and travel writing as it probes the countries’ shared history, borrowing the form of Edmund Spenser’s ‘Colin Clout’s Come Home Again’ as it summons the ghosts of those who haunt the places it visits.