A Slow Blues, Poems 1972-2012, brings together poems from David Cooke's three previous collections alongside A Virtual Tour, a sequence of more recent poems. In the words of William Bedford, writing in Agenda: 'The ghosts of a West of Ireland family haunt these poems, but Cooke is not treading ground already made familiar by others. Growing up in England, he is a poet whose 'making strange' grows naturally out of his exile between two countries. After a long silence, David Cooke has burst back into life, in a welcome and gifted performance.