A chapbook by the award-winning poet Sean O’Brien, presenting the first two cantos of a projected longer poem exploring the West London region where his parents met just after the war. Sean’s poem is a meditation on place, memory and nostalgia, informed by the voices of John Snagge, Richard Widmark and the Irish immigrants who filled the pubs along the riverside. He is already known as a poet of urban landscapes, having chronicled his hometown of Hull and his adopted city of Newcastle. He is also a poet of water, those ‘blue contested spaces’, and of rivers in particular, from the real Humber to the mythical Styx. The poem is accompanied by photographs of current-day Hammersmith as seen by Sean during his perambulations around the area, and an essay on his thoughts about the project. There is an introduction by the architectural critic Owen Hatherley, whose books include A New Kind of Bleak and The Ministry of Nostalgia.