Roughly a year from now Seren Books will publish my fourth collection of poems, The Weather in Normal. Each of my books has been quite different from the one before, and the difference in this one is that there are four long poems composed of short sections (I've never written poems longer than a page and a half before). I find it interesting that as I think the work becomes more accessible (with books 3 and 4), the techniques employed become more adventurous--I use space across the page more in this book than any other, yet I think in the whole the book is every bit as accessible as Imagined Sons.

I always ask both a British and an American poet for a blurb for each book, given my transatlantic life. The splendid poet Philip Gross has provided the first: "One of the particular gifts of poetry is here in force: the power of a few words to create great spaces. The spaces of a prairie landscape round a small town or between present and past, between people in a family or between words on the page, these are not emptiness but tingling with resonance, with the poems' fine attention. Touched and unsettled, we slip seamlessly between the intimate detail of loss and the vast perspective in which even the prairies are dwarfed by the scale of climate change."

I've begun booking readings for The Weather in Normal from October 2018, with launches planned for May/June. Ah, a new book! And always the hope that the latest book is the best of all.

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