Like the painter on his bike in the title poem, balancing a portrait of his father, Enda Wyley in her new collection seeks a balancing of art and experience with honesty, skill and heart.

Here are poems whose explicit wish is for the safe passage of others, for gatherings and regatherings, for the chance to “wake again to a hall / of light”, for life “to go on beyond this moment /and yet because of this moment.”

The Painter on his Bike is rich with memories and thoughts of the future, elegies for friends and fellow writers and love poems to husband and daughter; and, throughout, the fragile present moment somehow carefully balanced at the heart of it all.