John Ash’s new book is not ‘fiendishly gay / (in both senses of the term)’. In fact, he apologizes at the end for so many poems alluding to war and death, but that’s because he ‘could not, / after all, misrepresent life’, and in our time the honest poem must acknowledge that ‘The corpse’s watch is still ticking’. Ash has been called the best English poet of his generation, and I have no argument with that assessment. He has the clarity, intellectual liveliness, and sad sense of history that one finds in the great Greek poet C.P. Cavafy. Now living in Turkey, Ash, like Cavafy, sits at the edge of an empire, at the corner of the Mediterranean, watching the Great Powers in their stupidity and greed grind up the lives not only of the humans they dedicated themselves to ‘protect’, but of the very cultures in whose name they destroy. The longest poem in this collection of rather short works is ‘Hotel Sefaris’, about searching out the home of yet another Greek poet whose world was destroyed by war.