A dramatic and enthralling new collection from acclaimed poet Fran Lock. Forever Alive abounds in strange survivals: some enchanted, some obscene. A she-wolf haunts the site of her extinction, a soldier is troubled by sleepless fear of the desert; a murdered woman visits her husband with whispered curses. Here, nature extends both the threat and the promise of return. These are poems of long grudge and obscure supernatural vengeance. They are also poems about the love - of language, place, and people - that endures despite everything.

The Mystic and The Pig Thief is, in part, an elegy. It is also a book about the pain of being imperfectly assimilated, a book about being torn between the culture you come from and the society you're obliged to live in; a book about being pulled both ways while belonging to neither camp. The poems cross back and forth between bleak rural isolation and claustrophobic urban squalor, in Ireland, in England and in Europe. Mystic and Pig Thief are travellers, but more than being literally itinerant, they are spiritually homeless, and this to a terrible cost. The central sequence charts their inevitable transition from nomadic life, to a scattered, so-called settled existence on working-class sink estates. They stumble and struggle, picking up scraps of tradition and folklore; flirting on the fringes of the new-age 'crusty' scene, but always marginal, peripheral, only ever truly real to each other. Although portions of the sequence take Ireland as their back-drop, The Mystic and The Pig Thief is not about Irishness, or even about "Travellerness" per se. It is about loss, about the fall-out from, and the strategies for, dealing with an identity in rapid dissolution.