Xo Nus / Sun Ox

In his fourth collection with Shearsman Books, Daragh Breen plays the Pied Piper that leads us on a strange but merry dance through centuries of observations, giving us glimpses of an opera that is operatic in the broadest sense, (no opera-glasses required), ruminations on the traumatic Earth-bound life of a sun ox, his thoughts on subjects such as tail growth, both human and rodent, a toad and its umbrellas, and stars that have lost their purchase, while beneath it all lies a watery preoccupation that constantly threatens to break its banks, before closing the collection with a colour-coded Four Seasons sequence.