This collection recounts a number of journeys that the stowaway of the title, a kind of anti-Ulysses, takes around the eastern Mediterranean, journeys that transcend historical time and incorporate elements of the mythic and the magical, as well as actual historical phenomena, from the fall of Byzantium to the Syrian civil war and the emergence of Islamic State or Daish. Sometimes the speaker in the poems is the stowaway himself, sometimes his account is overlaid by a retrospective narrator or the autobiographical interjections of the poet. In this way the stowaway’s story and the telling of it merge in a fragmented, multi-layered narrative.

Stowaway: A Levantine Adventure is a richly imagined poetic journey by previous Wales Book of the Year winner Richard Gwyn.