Local habitation - Peter Dale

This sequence of poems in three voices introduces a ghostly eternal triangle whose lines are ruled feint or bold in response to situation, time and change. A man and two women explore their memories in conversational poems which, in their combination of lyric and narrative, form a novel contribution to poetry. The story is of an abruptly ended first love affair, an encounter and marriage with another, the joy of birth, the mourning for the infant's death and its aftermath. The voices of the protagonists, rooted in their local habitations, weave in and out of the speech and consciousness of each of them with all the nuances, pleasures and regrets of hindsight and its shifts in recollection.

Peter Dale was born in Addleston, Surrey in 1938 and educated at St Peter's College, Oxford. He worked as a secondary school teacher before becoming a freelance writer in 1993. He was co-editor of the poetry journal Agenda for many years. He is renowned for his translations from French (Corbire, Laforgue, Valry and Villon) and Italian (a complete terza rima English version of Dante's Divine Comedy). His new and selected poems, Edge to Edge, appeared in 1997 and was followed by Under the Breath in 2002 and Local Habitation in 2009. He now lives in Cardiff.