David Swann’s debut collection, The Privilege of Rain (Waterloo Press, 2010), was shortlisted for the 2011 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry, and took readers into the tense world of a high-security prison. Now, in this long-awaited follow-up, the writer lifts his thumb and heads out onto the open road. In a host of prize-winning poems, the freedoms and terrors of hitch-hiking are set against the tug of home. Veering between the lanes of elegy and comedy, the exhilaration of European travel and the joys and pains of small town life, Gratitude on the Coast of Death mines the rich vein of Northern surrealism which continues to survive in the post-industrial cracks of our divided nation. Whether set on the wind-blown moors, the ‘wild hills’ of Crete, or in the stifling offices of provincial newspapers, these tender, often funny, poems search for the biggest scoops of these anxious times – the headlines known by the human heart. Late final. Read all about it.