Desk With A View starts from William Carlos Williams’ insistence on the local and particular, and his dictum that anything is fit material for poetry. Some poems are located in north London, others move back to childhood in Glasgow, while others move out to interrogate wider cultural and political issues. These include poems on the legacy of Socialism, meditations on nationalism, sex & love , and personal elegies. These poems are informed by literary tradition without being inhibited by it, working in a lively, accessible contemporary idoim spiced by black humour.
'… it is a pleasure to find work that has something to say and says it with with and perspicuity.'
- Vernon Scannel, Ambit
'By turns elegiac, serious and funny, Docherty places descriptions of childhood and growing up against a wonderfully evoked background of popular culture and politics.'
- Keith Blount, Weekly Post
'Brian Docherty writes well about politics and survival/exile.'
- Ian MacMillan, The Wide Skirt
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