Gift Horses

"Gift Horses" is the first full collection of poems from National Poetry Competition winner, Simon Rae. While exhibiting all the sharpness of his topical satires, these poems display an exuberant and sometimes shocking extension of his poetic range. From the dangerously unreliable mounts of the title poem running amok on the race-course through equally dangerous encounters with a bruiser in a bar, Saddam Hussein and a ship's captain with a gun and a grudge, to studies of torturers, rapists and unwitting arsonists, Rae's poems explore the darker side of human behaviour. He also writes powerfully about love, infidelity, loss and morality. "Gift Horses" concludes with his National Poetry Prize poem, 'Believed', a witty and poignant meditation on the elusiveness of identity.