The breakfast room

Plot

The waif-like figure peering from Bonnard's The Breakfast Room instils a sense of mystery and marginality in Stewart Conn's title-poem. Among other portents of transience in his latest collection are two briefly glimpsed duck shooters. Responses to music, tinged with warmth and humour, highlight the redeeming power of art. The book concludes with a group of love poems imbued with tenderness and a treasuring of the here and now.