Reading in youth, re-reading in middle age and the life being led by the reader. This is the subject of Bed Time Reading, a sequence of poems prompted by sight of the student’s “voracious pencil” on an old copy of Anna Karenina and sustained by the quest for words, named by Larkin as being “at once true and kind”

Adrian Buckner edits the poetry magazine Assent. His previous, full-length, collection, Contains Mild Peril, was published by Five Leaves.