of British origin, collected by Harry Smith. This final Li Shang-yin poem appeared in An Educated Desire: Robert Sheppard at 60, ed. Scott Thurston (Newton-le-Willows: Knives Forks and Spoons Press, 2015).

* an epithalamy, or ballad was written for the wedding of my artist and curator friends David and Carolyn, at Harty (on the Isle of Sheppey off the north Kent coast), a potential site for the hall of Heorot – which explains why stanza 2 combines Beowulf ’s lines 8 (under wolcnum), 93 (swá wæter bebúgeð) and 211 (under beorge). The Latin tag – ‘as the clinging ivy / embraces the tree’ – is from Catullus, poem lxi, an epithalamium; ‘unconcealment’ is Greek ἀ-λήθεια (again! – here reflecting David’s interest in Heidegger) and ‘rest and peace’ come, as they would, from Bach (specifically the Cantata bwv 208: ‘Kann man Ruh und Friede spüren’). The title comes from George Puttenham’s 1589 Arte of English Poesie ; as with the other wedding-poem collected here, use is made of Sappho (and Catullus) as also Spenser. * Bass adds Bass was written for the bass player Dominic Lash and performed at his ‘farewell’ concert / leaving party in London’s Café oto before a temporary move to New York in early 2011. The title and a few words are lifted from the very fine song Bass Adds Bass by Family Fodder. The party performance by myself with Dom Lash on bass was filmed by Helen Petts: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PmFR5xNhjE Georg Trakl fails to write a Christmas poem – the nearest he got, according to a title index I started from, were ‘Im Winter’, ‘Wintergang in a-Moll’ and ‘Winternacht’. Phrases from these are permuted, a notion I got after prolonged contemplation of his often exceedingly eccentric usage of colourwords. This was published as a year’s-end card in 2014. David Davis’s bone density was written for Badge of Shame, one of a series of responsive anthologies, Purges (edited anonymously and with no place of publication given, but declared to be a ‘strong and stable production’, 2017). It was prompted by the widely reported suggestion of the elder statesman it commemorates, that refugee children should have their teeth x-rayed to assess their age – and thus whether their plight should count for anything. Since the poem was written and first published Davis has, of course, been promoted to glory, and his density has become common knowledge worldwide. There is a snatch of dentally related speech from the film Marathon Man near the close. * The Matter of Ireland is a term for the corpus of mediaeval Welsh stories

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