Sent to another camp, witty artisto, O'Donoghue's epistle is by turns sombre, comic, personal and public. A tour de force of tightly-rhymed observations and witticisms on the Iraq debacle and modern life in general, with vivid snapshots of the Brighton shoreline and the town's outlying pleasure gardens, the poem delights in a delicious 'end of the peer' humour.

It is a much-needed response to an issue on which Britain's poets have been strangely silent.

Make no mistake about O'Donoghue's achievement and wit. Only Glynn Maxwell is capable of a tour de force of his stature, a rhyme spre that wheels and never ends
Simon Jenner

Soft, strong and thoroughly absorbing
Alan Morrison