Jeffrey Sinclair is a man of words and feelings who writes about life with all its joy and sadness. He paints pictures with words, like an artist who experiments with color to make sense of the world. His deeply honest and personal examination of the emotion of grief derives from the death of his twelve year old son in 1996. Grief may be forever, but his love for family and life give reason for survival. Jeffrey Sinclair is both lover and poet and he has retained a sense of humour in a world of equal trauma and delight. ‘Creation’ is a poem of fun, with its finely scanned stanzas that will bring a smile to any reader. As will the joy in ‘Being in Aix’. The poems in this collection are full of memorable images and characters. From the young man in ‘Clyde Railway Station’, to the lovers in ‘Purple Soup Bowls’ to the woman in Monmartre and her limited but courageous existence, Jeffrey Sinclair shows a real affinity with his characters and succeeds in bringing them to life for the reader. Look deeper into this beautiful book and find the soldier of the Great War as he struggles to be remembered, then waken into a dawn of wonder in ‘An Irregular Piece of Sky’, the poem from which the collection takes its title. This poem shows life as lived under a piece of sky that doesn’t fit but is ‘irregular’. No two lives, or pieces, are the same. In a reverie, the poet goes in search of his son.
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