A dazzlingly various collection, "Local Honey" juggles its opposites with panache - heart and intellect, melancholy and zest, derangement and perspicacity. Beginning with early stirrings of logical thought in a Palaeolithic cave, the collection ranges through times, places and viewpoints before homing close in the last poems to recent family predicaments that are personal in their particulars, universal in their resonance. En route, four sections of sonnets and sestinas, blues and ballad rhythms transport us through themes and places: mind and love and nonsense - the moon - Greece, Italy, Morocco, Iceland, the haunted Elysian forest of memory. The book is animated by a rich cast of characters: shepherds and beekeepers, a Sufi flute-player, a reprobate fireman, a passionate devotee of ortolan buntings, an admiral who composes piano music at sea.