I’ve never reviewed two books by the same author in successive weeks before, but I’m happy to make an exception now.

My review of Frank Prem’s ‘Small Town Kid’ came out last week. Frank was pleased to see that I liked it, so he sent me a copy of his next, ‘Devil in the Wind’. It’s another book of free verse, this time inspired by the 2009 bushfires in Australia.

I generally take my time with poetry books, but I opened this one to make sure that my Kindle copy had downloaded properly and I was immediately gripped. I read it over the next couple of days, hardly an achievement because poetry books don’t have that many words in them, but not the way I would usually approach poems at all.

I found the work immensely moving. Frank does, admittedly, have spectacularly moving source material, but I vaguely remember reading about it in newspapers time and the naked facts don’t have the same gut wrenching impact as these verses.

As I said last week attitudes to poetry are inevitably subjective, and perhaps you won’t feel the same way about them as I did. If you go onto Amazon, though, ‘Look inside’ will let you read all but the last page of his ‘Prologue’ which grabbed me by the throat and pretty well forced me to read on. All I can suggest is that you do just that. If you like it, please buy the book. It’s wonderful.

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