''These poems record a life lived sensuously and to the full in three countries: Italy, Ireland, and Australia. In an era when eros-charged descriptions of foreign feasts make best-selling travel books and TV programs, this book will find a large audience. But Luke Whitington is far more than a sensualist whose mind's tongue curves inquisitively round gnocchi in the shape of a famous courtesan's navel. This is a poet who knows history and art, and feels intensely both youth's freshness and the nostalgias of age, lamenting lost parents and lovers. His Italy is flavoured by Horace and Brodsky; and his imagery is rich and deep. Hedges shaken by a storm in Ireland are seen 'running away like green-cloaked rogues'. The moon rises like a "Soaring circular Sphinx, slowing in mid-summer night air". Youth clings to a middle-aged man's complexion "Like an anxious fly". A high wind sets the leaves "streaming this way, that way / Like frightened mice". Lovers lie embraced, "While the whole world looks, and thinks it sees." Pigeon-swarms, "intoxicated with the element", swerve, dissolve, reform "as if to a heavenly conductor's baton". Cows in a water-meadow munch flowers "where Vikings rose in roars from bumping prows of curved ships". A poet of such luxuriant talent would normally have revealed it over a lifetime in a dozen slim volumes. Whitington instead has saved all his riches and served them up in this one sitting. Enjoy!' - Mark O'Connor' (Publication summary)
