The Book of Belongings

"The Book of Belongings" reads like an archaeology of the lost, its pages carefully uncovering and observing what has vanished, died or been abandoned. Visiting former theatres of war, remote landscapes of Scotland, France and Greece, pre-war classrooms and the nightmares of childhood, these poems are not afraid to gaze long and hard at what has been deliberately concealed, erased, or dismissed as worthless - the past with all its demons, its sad domestic litanies. Brian Johnstone writes with an enviable facility, often from unusual perspectives, eliding time and space, letting geography merge seamlessly into history and, in so doing, gives vanished histories a voice.