In No Time, decades are bridged by a return to the scenes of childhood holidays, or by reading a grandfather’s wartime letters. There are poems marking the conjunction of public and private events, and others about the joys and losses of middle age. Rigidity is melted by tenderness, and the fluency of living is challenged by illness. Poems are set in Greece, Oxford and Cornwall; the cast includes the Beatles, Rembrandt and the Voyager 1 probe, and Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ is rewritten by Housman, Eliot and Larkin. The book includes work first published in magazines such as New Statesman, The Spectator and The Times Literary Supplement. The book was launched in the Upper Library of Christ Church earlier this year.

Kieron’s first collection of poems, The Mortal Man, was warmly praised by, among others, Melvyn Bragg, Clive James and The Times Literary Supplement.