Peter Daniels has long demonstrated his skill as a poet who can write about being a gay man, and he now applies this to the experience of becoming older, finding new love and looking back on how he has reached this point. He recasts the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza into a sequence exploring confusion and sanity in a relationship. The poems play with the texture of language, in a stimulating range of forms.

While many of the themes and preoccupations here are those of an older man, there is a vigorous and irrepressible creative presence at the heart of Old Men. Daniels seems to possess all the benefits of age: a breadth of reading and an abundance of lived experience, with none of the drawbacks; certainly there is no lack of verve and inventiveness here, and I for one eagerly await a further instalment – Even Older Men – in the fullness of time.

Peter Daniels is the author of four poetry collections and several pamphlets, including two Poetry Business prizewinners. He has won poem competitions including the Arvon, TLS and Ledbury, and his translations of Vladislav Khodasevich from Russian (Angel Classics, 2013) were shortlisted for three awards including the Oxford-Weidenfeld prize. He has a Creative Writing PhD from Goldsmiths, London. As queer writer in residence at the London Metropolitan Archives he wrote the obscene Ballad of Captain Rigby.