Inbetween Days – Antony Dunn

Valley Press
26 October 2026

Limited edition hardback
ISBN: 9781915606907
Pre-order now:
https://valleypressuk.com/products/inbetween-days

& paperback
ISBN: tba

“every living thing that ever lived
is here, is with you, scarcely out of sight”

Antony Dunn’s Inbetween Days inhabits the charged territory between childhood and parenthood: a place of intense pleasure, pressure, responsibility and joy.

In poems that call and respond to his previous collection, Take This One to Bed, Dunn traces lines of inheritance and succession – from not-quite-grandfather to ‘hard-born, hard-won’ son, from poet to poet, from younger selves to older ones. These are poems of lives entangled with other lives, of sorrow accumulated and love stubbornly renewed, finding refuge in the most surprising places.

Poised between celebration and lament, between the dead and the living, Inbetween Days is an urgent, intimate and vividly alive collection, written – after a decade’s distraction – during a year-long residency in the poet’s own back-garden shed.

____

‘A collection I didn’t know I’d been thirsting for – absolutely gorgeous and a joy to read, keenly tuned to all our loves, guilts and griefs, punctuated by an aviary of strange winged prayers and written with a craft so deep and fluent that the whole collection is as musical and supple as wren-song.’
FIONA BENSON

‘This is a wonderful collection, measured and lucid, economical and unclouded, full of poems that can make light work of heavy weather, often walking the microtonal terrain between childhood and parenthood – the borderlands of letting go – to cast a wry, level eye over proceedings, quietly revelatory and truthful.’
PAUL FARLEY

‘The movements of a life, childhood, midlife, death and departure, move through these pages and yet there is always the poem, here to help us pause, to hold time, to offer space for contemplation and ultimately to change us with their quiet beauty. A remarkable and moving new collection.’
ANDREW McMILLAN

‘An explosive quiet permeates these records of immediate and expansive scope where nothing is mere quandary or felicity but is always brokered with its reverse face, its other engagements yet to be made which make this collection so enjoyably philosophical yet worldly wise.’
DALJIT NAGRA

____

Son

At five, you find your way into our bed
with all your small, smooth body and great heat
and find your restless, forty-something dad
besieged by dreams – the one in which I cheat,
the one in which I marvellously rage,
the dreadful dream in which I love someone
I’ve never met or someone half my age,
the one in which I leave us all alone.
I’m sorry for this mess of selves, my son –
this uninvited, tattered crowd – but you
should know that, inbetween us, there is one
whose dreams are still, still, beautiful and true.
Alone among these forty-something men,
how must you know, son, which will wake, and when?

____