Masks. This item is unavailable.Masks

In this ambitious new book of poems, Duncan Bush uses a glittering variety of voices and poetic personae. His characters include a South African ex-mercenary, a Welsh hill farmer's widow, a Cardiff garage mechanic, tourists, and, most memorably in his long poem sequence for two voices, 'Are There Still Wolves In Pennsylvania', a tragically disturbed American Vietnam War veteran and his wife.

Not only do these poems show a novelist's flair for creating worlds rich in detail, they present us with characters who are wrestling, to varying degrees of success, with the compelling moral dilemmas of our day. The author's darkly ironic precision in such poems as, 'A.I.D.S. (The Movie)', 'Living in Real Times' (a response to Bosnia), and 'After Chernobyl' keep us riveted throughout this new collection.

"... this remarkably adroit set of meditations on the relations between history, politics and fiction"
Terry Eagleton, Stand

"Part poetry, part history, part mystery; it is impossible to convey the brilliance of Bush's accomplishment... it speaks clearly to the timelessness of repression and resistance, brutality and resilience"
The Virginia Quarterly

Duncan Bush was born and brought up in Cardiff, Wales. He was educated at Warwick, Duke and Oxford Universities. His collection Masks (1994) was a PBS Recommendation and Arts Council of Wales Book of the Year. He has also published novels, Glass Shot (Secker) and The Genre of Silence as well as scripts for stage and screen. He currently divides his time between Wales and Europe.