The Empty Air: New Poems 2006-2012

Tony Connor’s tenth collection is framed by military encounters. In the first poem a young man grapples with a malfunctioning machine-gun, while the author grapples with the poem he is making from this event, memory or fantasy. In the surrealistic sequence that ends the book, a strange army invades a country collapsing into societal and semantic dissolution.

Connor’s abiding preoccupations continue into his eighties: his own life and the lives around him, passing time and its traps, poetry ...