The urge to understand what ‘may always be’, through imagination and memory, is the leitmotif in this collection of poems by Scots emigré David Tomassini. Poetry as an emotional reasoning aloud in meaningful, musical images may only come ‘occasionally’, through suffering or joy, but shapes a vision of life. From growing up on the ill-fated fermtouns of lowland Scotland in the 1960s to travel ‘notes’, impressions and translations from the wider European world, the subject of these varied, diachronic poems is the human condition per se, albeit as experienced in the petty first person. For the irresolvable contradiction between limited solitary self-consciousness and historical reality remains – the unbearable absurdity of our individual deaths and the world’s continuance. Somehow, somewhere, everything always is.

David Tomassini was born in Berwickshire, grew up in East Lothian and now lives in rural Marche (Italy). In addition to his activities as a qualified youth football instructor, he has translated far too many books, principally in the fields of architecture and art history.