Elegy turns into affirmation, ‘binding the pulse / back into the body’, in this new collection by Eric Gregory Award-winning poet Roger Garfitt. Roger Garfitt has published sparingly but always to good effect. The Action reveals the individual character of each poem and sequence, ‘written only when the internal pressure demands and the slow pace of craft allows’. Carol Ann Duffy observed in The Guardian that ‘he clearly believes, quite rightly, in the Muse and his approach has the patience of a journeyman’s to his craft’.

Hard-won, but not austere, the poems are marked by tenderness and passion; quiet humour rather than irony runs through them. Sean O’Brien writes, ‘He is both a meticulous re-creator of, for example, the effects of light, and a sociable poet who sees place as expressive of its inhabitants… The minuteness of his attention is often rewarding… an intriguing counterpart to the more public work of Douglas Dunn and Tony Harrison.’