This is Ralph Hawkins' first full-length collection in some years and brings one of the most original voices of his generation back before the poetry public. Besides the title collection, this volume contains the 'Pushkin' poems, and two further new sequences, 'Uruk' and 'The Littoral Zone'.

The Churches in Christ are in growing disagreement about the direction that the Restoration Movement should take. A Heritage in Crisis introduces the background of this "identity crisis," evaluates nine specific issues that threaten to divide the Churches of Christ today--such as worship styles and women's roles--and suggests changes Churches in Christ can make in order to facilitate the change back to God's original intent for the church. More than simply an academic examination of doctrinal issues, A Heritage in Crisis seeks to identify a path by which the Churches of Christ might move into...

"Ralph Hawkins' poems minimise the gap of 'constructive effort' between the basic seeking of pleasure and pleasurable sensations, and the "mediated" pleasure of the poem. [...] He does not bother with stage-setting. Each poem launches us into a series of "direct experiences" from whose course we could work out the shape of the self experiencing them. Hawkins is not asking how experience happens, but by describing the course of a self he answers the question anyway. The course is one of attention, constantly switching on and off, jumping between planes; Hawkins' method is to eliminate whatever...