The Red-funnelled Boat

The Red-Funnelled Boat charts a course through richly varied territory, from theological obsession to the paranoid fantasies of the armchair footballer, the vernacular hell of mental illness and the author’s lyrical yearning for the elsewheres of the Hebrides and the cinematic Midwest. These precisely imagined, disturbing and fascinating poems establish Armstrong as a powerfully assured new voice, and a phrase-maker of startling originality. ‘Armstrong’s is indeed an excellent collection. Though