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Wilkinson examines why W. S. Graham's verse never sounds inconsequential. Graham's frequent use or echoing of ballad meter communes with a tradition where love and loss resonate, along with the grotesque, the criminal, dead infants, drowning, and lonely death--a measure freighted with first and last things, and tested over time for memorability. The simple and the recognizable consort with Graham's modernist worrying at the opacities of linguistic communication; preoccupied with how verse makes such opacities at once painfully present and mysteriously connective, Graham's poetry attends closely to its own materials, even if its constant scratching of the same spot can become wearisome.

The desire to \"be back\" in Scotland increasingly preoccupied W. S. Graham throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Longing marks many of his poems, particularly the Greenock poems in Implements in Their Places (1977), where Graham evokes his childhood home with haunting, and haunted, particulars. In these pieces, nostalgia is a thing language does, as well as a feeling one has. Here, Brooks-Motl examines Graham's poems.

Noel-Tod examines W. S. Graham's Ten Shots of Mister Simpson. Ten Shots of Mister Simpson is the least well-known of the longer poems in Graham's last collection, Implements in Their Places (1977). Like the title sequence and the opening poem it presents an extended meditation on language, representation, and the relationship between reader and writer, through a series of discrete numbered stanzas set at angles to each other. What holds them together is the conceit of a man, Mister Simpson, who is being posed for a photograph somewhere under Zennor Hill, a familiar landmark in Graham's corner of southwest Cornwall.

In Whose Man in Havana? the author offers an unconventional, often dark, but more often hilarious view of diplomacy in settings as varied as Haiti, London, the Dominican Republic, the Balkans, Palestine, Paraguay, Guyana, and Kyrgyzstan, including covert monitoring of Soviet military operations in Cuba on behalf of the CIA with the blessing of President Kennedy and Prime Minister Pearson. In a career that spans the Canadian foreign service and international organizations, he was fortunate to be in the right place at interesting, if turbulent, times. Throughout the book he has focussed on the lighter side of people and places, but almost everywhere the dark side intrudes. Graham makes plain that the intersection of the two is frequently black comedy.