Feel Free

Nick Laird has been an assured and brilliant voice in contemporary poetry since his acclaimed debut, To a Fault, in 2005. Feel Free, his fourth collection, effortlessly spans the Atlantic, combining the acoustic expansiveness of Whitman or Ashbery with the lyricism of Laird's forebears Heaney, MacNeice and Yeats. With characteristic variety, invention and wit (here are elegies, monologues, formal poems and free verse) the poet explores the sundry patterns of freedom and constraint - the family, the impress of history, the body itself - and how we might transcend them. Feel Free is always daring, always renewing, and Laird's most remarkable work to date.