Julian Turner’s Crossing the Outskirts was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize best first collection. In his second book he explores his familiar themes of identity and loss, and new, more personal ones – the way the degradation of the environment touches on his experience, the fragility of life and the ambiguous allure of death. By contrast, his gondolier’s eye view of Lord Byron is another small-scale masterpiece of comic timing. This collection marks a development in his strong technique and gives us poems that are comic, elegiac and profound by turns.