Written over twenty-one days of the Iraqi invasion and its immediate aftermath, Letter to Lord Rochester is an attempt to update Auden’s 1936 Letter to Lord Byron.

Sent to another camp, witty artisto, O’Donoghue’s epistle is by turns sombre, comic, personal and public. A tour de force of tightly-rhymed observations and witticisms on the Iraq debacle and modern life in general, with vivid snapshots of the Brighton shoreline and the town’s outlying pleasure gardens, the poem delights in a delicious ‘end of the peer’ humour.

It is a much-needed response to an issue on which Britain’s poets have been strangely silent.