Michael O’Neill, Professor of English at Durham University, was a gifted poet and influential critic of Romantic poetry who died just before Christmas from the cancer of the oesophagus which is the subject of his final volume of verse, Crash & Burn. It opens with the words ‘Good news’ from this sensibly / downbeat nurse, / who’s schooled me in the school of knocks that are hard from the wryly prophetic poem ‘False Positive’, and ends with the words ‘Goodnight, sweet prince’ from Hamlet. There’s humour, love, and warmth here, as well as pain, as he honestly describes his feelings from diagnosis through surgery and post-op chemo to that moment when the tenses have not // quite ended not / ended not / quite not quite.