If you have ever had trouble with your boiler’s water pressure, or ever wondered if we can sustain a distinction between ‘self’ and ‘soul’ or whether incompetent  heating engineers could be the agents of Satan then this is the poem for you.
 
Over forty-eight heptameter sonnets the story is told of two men, as related as chalk and cherries – aesthetic fastidious André and Terry the roughneck glutton. At school they were together, in adulthood apart. Each has fallen foul of the Powers of Darkness, for which there will be a punishment that turns out to be a revelatory one for André’s wife Pia.  This darkly ebullient narrative poem is both Manichaean and nicely preposterous.
 
 
‘All this and his eye for vivid telling details mark James Russell as a true story teller and a true poet’.
 
– Lee Harwood