Sacredly Profane

'Sacredly Profane has all the outstanding qualities of Kevin Densley's previous collections - sparky lyricism, revealing jaunts down the byways of history, an abiding fascination with overlapping high and low cultures - but also a new, and strangely timely, element: deep, resonant pathos. Readers can still find sea-horses delicate as embryos, dreamy girlfriends naked in Arcady and childhood athletes shattered like meringues, but also the erasure of families from a bleak landscape ("There is noth