Sometimes the most profound echoes of loss, of love and grief, are held so gently, like water in cupped hands, that every drop is precious; not to be spilled. Darren Freebury-Jones's Rambling holds its emotions as delicately and, like the poet's revelations in tranquillity so admired by William Wordsworth, turns stillness itself into an event. Look closer, and beneath the seemingly ordinary encounters which make up a history of everydays - conversations had, leaning against a wall or in the pub; human ingenuities seen through the miraculous eyes of childhood; the scent of a new birth in fatherhood's first flush; and a hundred other incremental rites of passage - deeper currents stir. These are not just memories. They are ghosts pulsed into palpability through Freebury-Jones's command of his craft; the personalities and presences which shaped the story of a life, conjured from the eddying depths with the skill of a master-necromancer. Rambling is a journey, taken through the poet's path in so deftly insightful a fashion that it leads you back, almost unawares, to your own lost road. A stunning and assured debut.

- Chris Laoutaris, author of Bleed and See