RaveScottish Poetry Library (UK)Still Life is very much a last book, written in the face of terminal illness, but it shows no flagging of his protean inventiveness in the face of the complexities of the world of Belfast, deepened as it is by a ruefully humorous acknowledgement of his own mortality. The slenderness of his hold on life in his last months seems to have deepened and strengthened his sense of both life and art ... The result is a wonderfully probing as well as movingly self-conscious contribution to the modern ekphrastic tradition ... It is as fine as anything this wonderfully inventive poet has written, leaving us with a complex series of intricately interwoven ‘living mechanisms’ that is both a joyful affirmation of the vitality of the aesthetic and an admirably resourceful intellectual response to the intimations of mortality gleaned during his last months on the planet.
