?'Love is my nature and I've paid the price.' In a Town of Five Thousand People, Frank McGuinness's fifth collection, demonstrates again the 'energy and intensity' Peter Denman noted in Poetry Ireland Review. The scathing invective of 'The Town Next to Us', a series of loving elegies for artists and actors and a record of struggles with religious ties anatomize 'the darkness within the darkness'. The broad sweep of 'Heligan', brief poems of lyric pitch, 'American Football in Booterstown Park', 'Limerick Junction and Marco Polo' display an imagination given free rein. Urgent and prodigious, this is a book of wide-reaching embrace.