I dreamt I wrote another me

Alex Smith grew up a Catholic boy in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles, under the threat of the bomb and the gun and sectarian violence, beside a hard border and even harder men. His poetry takes us back to those days and documents them in stark and unflinching detail. Even when he turns his gaze to the wider world and later times, we find that although the boy has left Belfast... Well, you know the rest. He is 'Just another soldier / in the war of who was wronger / and when it stops mattering.'