Bene-Dictions is a canny, unnerving book. Its cool manners seem to hold compassion at bay; but its irony is a cleansing discipline which allows it to conjure complex lusts, hurts, and injustices without self-pity and, apparently, without delusion. These poems describe a world in which: 'Tenderness is an accident of character or energy, or just a side-effect/ of having failed at what you wanted, but in which the reader, to read the effect of rain on paper /opens the book/ in a storm, as though to find the world itself in tears.' - Rosanna Warren, Judge; ""If the long hours in offices of the mind elect for us meaningfulness, they must always eventually find the human heart. Then Rankin's vivid and surprising poems map that movement where as Rilke insists, what is sublime is mundane, and everything that falls must somehow in shadow/act, rise."" - Norman Dubie
