Poetry Bank Choice. Mark Waldron’s debut collection The Brand New Dark is a book about sex, eyes, eggs, dogs, death and sausages. It is a book concerned with our loss of faith in language, a book about our place in the world, about sex and love and a pair of puppets called Dougal and Florence.

This surreal, absurd and entertaining collection mixes the formal with the colloquial, the tragic and the comic, the intensely personal and the comically detached, in a style which is startlingly original without being obscure.

Funny, dark, disconcerting and moving, often all at the same time, the poems are refreshingly direct, spoken in a way that seems to implicate the reader in their situations and discomfiting stories. The Brand New Dark is above all an entertaining collection of accessible poems. A book for all the people who don’t like poetry as well as for the people who do.