Weighing the Air

Weighing the Air

Weighing the Air is Peter Howard's first full collection of poems, published in 2008 by Arrowhead Press.

Weighing the Air is a delight, both for those of us who have long admired this unusual and unusually gifted poet and for strangers to his work, to whom I would expect it to come as a revelation.

Peter Howard's verse is above all highly readable and enjoyable. Making full use of his scientific background and also foreground, he is equally at home with realism and surrealism, typically marrying the two. He is often very funny indeed; in tours-de-force of comic invention he can move us unexpectedly, lighting the human condition from unorthodox angles. Hymning the flight of the parrot, probing the mystery of strangers, revealing the pathos of a neglected tyre-iron, he can make the prosaic somehow miraculous. Not everyone will understand everything - I certainly don't - but the zest and panache and finally the authenticity of the whole endeavour, will keep the reader pleasurably afloat.

Kit Wright

www.arrowheadpress.co.uk