“It was the kind of day/ that slows down after half past one…”writes Adrian Buckner (“Suburban Memory”). Contains Mild Peril is the kind of book that turns a slow afternoon into a richly rewarding one.

Buckner’s first full collection is not a book to be belted through, snatched between one commitment and the next, not a book with sharp elbows or a cutting tongue; but a book to be savoured, enjoyed and admired for its gentleness and humour. Its heroes are provincial old codgers, village cricketers, the invisible people who live behind net curtains, the stalwarts who make up the numbers at adult education classes.

If Contains Mild Peril celebrates the determinedly unfashionable, it certainly doesn’t wallow in nostalgia. Full of surprises and wonderful images (the girls on the bus who are sundered and re-united, the yellow hoop stuck in a playground tree) Buckner is in the best tradition of quiet men — when he talks, everyone stops to listen.

“A Buckner poem moves, and moves unexpectedly. He does this not to be pyrotechnic, or modish, but because his subject is mankind…” – U.A. FANTHORPE

Adrian Buckner has published two pamphlet collections, The Blameless Life (1997) and One Man Queue (2004). Contains Mild Peril is his first full collection. He edits the journal Poetry Nottingham and lectures in Creative Writing at Derby University. He lives in Derbyshire with his wife and two children.