West pathway

When Steve Ellis was a youthful Gregory award-winning poet, the Literary Review hailed him as 'a wonderfully no-nonsense writer...a sardonic Yorkshireman monitoring scenes rooted in directly accessible experience'. He went on to publish his first book with Bloodaxe in 1986, Home and Away, which got some good reviews. Seven years have passed, and Ellis has assembled a second collection. Life may have frayed him a bit in the meantime, but his dead pan humour is as wicked as ever, and he's still able to chronicle the rituals of family and the sad or absurd nuances of ordinary lives with warmth, affection, and just a little grumpiness. He's acquired a wife and family, a mortgage and a cat, and bears his responsibilities with a shrug and the odd, wary poem. He's moved to Birmingham, where he teaches at the University, and he's become something of an authority on Dante and Eliot. And he's written this book of wry, often hilarious poems: about lawnmowers, growing up in York, shoes, fish and the death of Joe Loss, Christmas cards, and other matters of great and small importance.