The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea

All the gifts so admired in Haddon's prose are strongly in evidence in his first book of poetry - the humanity of his voices, his dark humour and uncanny ventriloquism - but Haddon is also a poet of considerable seriousness, lyric power and surreal invention. With bittersweet love songs, comic set-pieces, lullabies, bold new versions of Horace, wry postmodern shenanigans (including a note from the official board of censors on " 18 " certificate poetry), and an entire John Buchan novel condensed to fives pages, The Talking Horse and the sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea confirms Haddon's reputation as one of the sharpest and most consistently surprising imaginations at work in contemporary literature.