After close to a decade where he has focused on teaching, fatherhood and running London's longest running poetry open mic, Poetry Unplugged, Niall O'Sullivan returns with Werewolf of London, a selection of some of his best known older poems alongside new verse written during his print hiatus. His newer work is still inflected with humour evident in his work since his 2004 début, but he seems to have found in his later work a register that ekes the majesty out of his reflections. Nowhere is this more evident than in the soaring nine-part sequence Now is Not the Time for Politics, which starts out in the realm of fatherhood where 'the mundane becomes so magical'; gathers the whole world and its winters in its span, where the 'warbling beyond our curtain is/ some Pentecostals giving Satan the boot'; and ends where most human interaction begins, with the word 'hello' – except it is uttered from the grave. A gem of fluid, funny, fierce verse.
