A Book of Psalms is about a life retrieved in which the commonplace is made new in poetry and everyday experience is undramatically revealed as approaching the miraculous. Gazing through the windows of the public library offers a prosaic starkness, ‘Leaking radiators, polished floors, books on everyday wellness’ somehow transformed via a ‘Leaf-vein atlas suddenly awake to sun on wings,’ so that in a playground, at the side of the road with cars passing, we are with ‘a local deity of the edgelands.’

And in this newly entered world this poet sees the immiseration of the dispossessed for what it is; tent cities in the underpass and men at traffic lights cleaning windscreens, fit subject for elegy and lament from a poet equal to the task. Baker’s declarative lyricism is a lifeline sustained throughout these 64 psalms. This is not just a poet writing poetry with its usual tricks and epiphanies. Baker has taken Sidney’s advice and looked in his heart to write. In this way the marketplace in town is a vision of the world with poetry in its very bones.

‘And all the people chilled and shouting their wares
Seemed living words that carry a history
In each syllable a song in every vowel’

—Kelvin Corcoran

Alan Baker was born and brought up in Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He has lived in Nottingham since 1985, where he runs the poetry publisher Leafe Press and its associated webzine, Litter.

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