Whether describing the wonder and fright of a crab giving birth, a visit to the dentist, or an estuary full of bodies and shimmering birds, Arthur Attwell shows how the ghosts of our childhood, relationships, and the course of history continue to find and startle us. "Here is a first collection which, combining the elegance and precision of an American master like Richard Wilbur, has an enviable capacity to contain very large matters in discrete forms." Stephen Watson "Attwell's poetry already has the grace and sweep of greatness . . . Not only is he a craftsman of the most particular focus (prosody), he has the knack for observation as well the ability to select exactly the right word (musicality), without - and this is the magic - losing the dreaminess and longing that makes us read poetry at all." Diane Awerbuck, Sunday Times "The poems in Killing Time are the product of ingenuity and labour. Here are dashing images, verbal cunning, original metaphors, layers, inversions, surprises -- all the panoply of poetry. But also music, for Attwell well knows that poetry begins and ends in sound." P R Anderson, Sunday Independent