Mid Life is subtitled 'Poetry 1980-2000', and is a revised and reconsidered Collected Poems covering the period 1980-1994 in terms of composition, and several further years of revision. The contents of this volume, in earlier versions, originally appeared as A Whole Bauble from Carcanet Press in 1995. Now revised, this volume sums up the author's "midlife" in compositional terms - the early period having been discarded, and the later appearing from Arc Publications as a series of books under the overall title Music. A retrospective volume in the year that the author turns 60, this book demonstrates the continuing fascination that works such as the long sequence 'Continual Song' can exert upon the reader. The opening period of the author's writing career - at least, that part of it with which he is now comfortable - is now again available for readers rightly fascinated by his more recent work.
