A Speaking Silence reveals the strong affinity between poetry and Quakerism. Yet this is not a book of sacred verse but a wide-ranging exploration of the real world in all its light and shade, seen through a distinctively Quaker poetic lens. These are, above all, good poems, and thoroughly contemporary in their variety of topics, voices, approaches and styles, the formal as well as the more experimental. These are poems that disturb silence significantly, as W S Graham said all good poetry should. They are poems to move you, delight you - and make you think.