Crisis Actor by Declan Ryan

Crisis Actor chronicles various failures and farewells. It is peopled by faded heroes and deferential devotees; a hanged donkey, a bloated rat; solitary bachelors and disillusioned youths – these are the watchers, not the players.

The poems are awash with rueful self-accusation and laconic scepticism. There are touching elegies, reportage and bruised, wary replayings. A blistering sequence about boxers and their fates weaves through the collection.

The overwhelming sense is of life going on elsewhere, the halcyon days and brightest of years long past. This is the aftermath of being one who – in Matthew Arnold’s words – ‘has reached his utmost limits and findshimself far less than he had imagined himself’. But there are still flashes of camaraderie, of stars aligning: lunchtimes in sunlit garden squares, languorous pub afternoons, cheering on and hard-won triumphs.

These precious, precarious moments point to how we might reclaim potential, discover human connection in times of defeat or despair, and reach towards grace and redemption.