The Arrow Maker is a marvellous book to read, preferably out loud. The command of language and rhythm is supreme and the sheer musicality of the poems makes for a delightful experience. There is more too.

Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that 'consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds'. I take that to mean that when faced with doubt or confusion the little mind falls back on orthodoxies and conventional thinking. Black does not have a little mind - his publications and careers vouch for that - and, though in a sense this collection explores the state of and consequences of unknowing or the seeking to know, Black's exploration of doubt is always a positive, energizing force that allows work to range very widely across times and subjects.

... The excellent 'The Moons Of Jupiter' posits people refusing to take up Galileo's offer to take a look through his new telescope. Black wonders if they were actually 'far-sighted' in seeing the potential outcome of such an innovation as industrial and commercial development and all that follows on, 'the poisoning of all the world's oceans, nuclear weapons in the hands of madmen,/ the choking of the earth's atmosphere, the dying of all the world's animals'.

Well, Bob Dylan sang that you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows and you don't need a telescope to see that it all ends badly. Just be glad you were around to have seen the earth at its best. As Black writes in 'My Wretched Species',

Black's ideas are strongly held but they are not offered with an overtone of the hell-fire preacher. His writing is too elegant, his mind is too open, enquiring, out of the box. The natural world is a focus for many of the poems. We are not simply observers delighting in what we see. We are part of that natural world and thus, part of its mystery too.

... How can you know? Understand? Experience? I'm not sure this collection offers a conclusive way forward but it is a spectacular exploration of trying that takes in, inter alia, Jacques Brel, Iphigenia, Michaelangelo, Saint Augustine and a masterly translation of Dante.

Awe-inspiring work.