Age has not diminished Michael Schmidt’s boyish wonder at the world but rather made his bemused questioning of the foibles of its fickle folk all the merrier and more poignant. These are also poems of self questioning, with Schmidt talking not just to Stanley Moss on the phone at night but engaging with the past (himself as a boy) while addressing himself in the present (still a boy at heart). They are wry, playful monologues puzzling over what can only be unpacked, or more often left equivocal, in the poem itself, for, as he writes, ‘tone is part of content, part of content’, ‘content’ being both the poem’s subject and its pleasing resolution. Reading this book, we find ourselves in the stimulating company of a poet-conversationalist par excellence, listening to what might feel addressed to us while eavesdropping on what is clearly not.

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