In Sea Table Kelvin Corcoran brings to all back home. Not that it was ever very far away, but for twenty years or more he has been writing a lot of poetry concerning Greece and may have gained a reputation as a specialist or travel-writing poet, both of which would be wrong. Greece, both place and stories, was a lens onto our present condition and its depths, and through that focus he developed an essentially lyrical (meaning "unshamedly poetry") field as the basis for a move towards larger forms: monologue and narrative, neither merely transcribed but re-invented every time from a literal rendering of the life and the materials. The four substantial sets in this book bring these extended skills to work on a range of subjects: a personal health crisis and recovery told as an underground descent and the return to intellectual light; a light-hearted musical prance around various poets; a rhapsodic rendering of the story of Glen Gould... And the last, the title-set, "Sea Table", which...