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A memory of near-drowning in childhood sets the terms for the unflinching intensity with which the sequence enters imaginatively into the victims’ last moments. The poems are borne on an undercurrent of humane outrage at the fatally thoughtless exploitation of the migrant workers whose deaths are recorded and mourned in imagery of such stark factuality... The lines pull back to the collection's thematic centre in memorialising the lives lost to the ungovernable power of the sea, they sound from the heart of the passion and pathos that mark Liardet's achievement. | Douglas Houston, Poetry Review
This is a remarkable elegy, unapologetically anguished and enraged. It is Liardet’s ‘Wreck of the Deutschland’ – a lament for real people tragically lost, real human beings making tragic mistakes, culminating in an agonized sense of wrongness and uncertainty… It is an intense and painful reading experience, as it should be. It honours the dead with dignity and beauty, and accomplishes an apparently effortless final catharsis. | Helena Nelson, Ambit, on Priest Skear |
