A Barrel of Dried Leaves

“A barrel not of laughs but of contortions, confusions and the occasional dry chortle – and of metre adorned with irregular, sometimes internal rhymes, assonances, alliterations, awkwardnesses and other such trickery unfashionable to the current academic ear, and not a murmur of the poet’s inner angst, failed loves or fortitude.” This second collection Cameron’s poetry contains a wide variety of subjects, not all of which are commonly associated with poetry: a weak man is interviewed by angelsand devils, an Afghan mystic tell us why he became on e, a riposte to Scott’s “Breathes there a man with soul so dead”, taking the side of the man with a dead soul, the English language, a lesson on Italian viticulture, and another on Italian anatomy amongst others.

Reviews of A Barrel of Dried Leaves

"Cameron confesses to a weariness with poetry's old forms and concerns, particularly the perennial Romantic subjects of love and exploration of the self. As a corrective, he … turns his presbyopic gaze outward in a sequence of poems that takes in eco-vandalism, press barons, George W. Bush and death. One admires his determination to reject … pretension and obscurantism …" – The Sunday Herald on Presbyopia