"Reed Music" is Peter Levi's first collection of completely new work since "Shadow and Bone" (1989). In these exhilarating poems he combines a watercolourist's gift for the spontaneous evocation of a scene with a very different gift for formal elegy. In addition to individual poems about friends, the English landscape, the Welsh borders and human mortality, there are four substantial sequences including "Poem for the Time of Day", a beautiful meditation as dusk falls at Gillan Creek in Cornwall.