Ideas of separation inhabit many of the poems in Owen Sheers’ second collection: the geographical and linguistic divides of borders, the separation of the living and the dead, the movement from childhood to adulthood, the fraying of relationships. It is in the acute awareness of such moments of separation – past or impending – and in the friction between these two diverse states that Sheers’ penetrating, tender poems are often formed. At once grounded and lyrical, the poems in Skirrid Hill, first published in 2005, reveal the continued growth of a poet gifted with a rare descriptive power and a uniquely sensitive insight into the trials and contours of life.