Rain Rider is a book of echoes and reflections: words are signs that keep changing their positions, suggesting new ideas. Briggs’s vision is essentially irreverent, whether he’s evoking the nostalgia of the Test Card, conjuring the Devil, or riffing on an artisan perfume. Sometimes, he writes about love.

Rain Rider Forecast La Perochonniére The Enigma of the Fool And a Star The Devil Follow Me The Hermit Signifier and Signified Quennet Test Card Green The Fear Florentine Locals Penlee No Prisoners Geography The Fool Subject to Experiments Hieratic O The Fool’s Quest Autobiographical Dissonance When Sam Beckett Liturgy The Mariner The Fool on Olympus The Wedding My Rival Last Letter to Calliope The Bridge The Developer The Thief Temperance Resolution The Equation The Fool’s Wake

What his new book shows is that his sense of poetic vocation has sharpened to a point at which a real kind of poetry makes its way through him, being shaped and shorn with enormous skill, but possessing its own life and duende.

Briggs has an artist's eye for detail, but it's an artist who has managed to bring their conceptual vision to bear on their formal accomplishment. He couples this with a robust and thrillingly far-reaching lexicon, the nuance as fitting as the sound, the imagery as ingeniously multilayered as the mirror maze where we encounter the devil and Samuel Beckett, the rival and the fool. This is also an unabashedly moral collection of poems, intellectually curious and broad-minded while refreshingly instructive – it cuts a swathe through a multitude of deposed grand narratives and never passes up the opportunity to dazzle, to succour or cajole.

Briggs has an artist's eye for detail, but it's an artist who has managed to bring their conceptual vision to bear on their formal accomplishment. He couples this with a robust and thrillingly far-reaching lexicon, the nuance as fitting as the sound, the imagery as ingeniously multilayered as the mirror maze where we encounter the devil and Samuel Beckett, the rival and the fool. This is also an unabashedly moral collection of poems, intellectually curious and broad-minded while refreshingly instructive - it cuts a swathe through a multitude of deposed grand narratives and never passes up the opportunity to dazzle, to succour or cajole. -- Luke Kennard Rain Rider is a kind of costume-drama sword fight between the forces of Art and Life, between the metaphorical and the literal, the fantastical and the mundane with a wonderful assortment of characters, landscapes, tastes, voices, vintages and weathers. Whether in the company of a latter day Dorian Gray or a small boy plotting revenge against the mob for an act of cruelty against his father, the reader has a sense of an elaborate game being played, of a system of cosmic interconnections coming apart at the seams and of anachronisms collapsing into modernity. This is a collection full of delight and intrigue. -- Annie Freud Rain Rider is thrillingly wide-ranging, a book of echoes and intricacies where you're as likely to meet the Devil as the Fool in poem after glittering poem. Briggs has written a mirror maze of a book you could lose yourself in for a very long time indeed. -- Jacob Polley Briggs has an artist's eye for detail, but it's an artist who has managed to bring their conceptual vision to bear on their formal accomplishment. He couples this with a robust and thrillingly far-reaching lexicon, the nuance as fitting as the sound, the imagery as ingeniously multilayered as the mirror maze where we encounter the devil and Samuel Beckett, the rival and the fool. This is also an unabashedly moral collection of poems, intellectually curious and broad-minded while refreshingly instructive - it cuts a swathe through a multitude of deposed grand narratives and never passes up the opportunity to dazzle, to succour or cajole. -- Luke Kennard Rain Rider is a kind of costume-drama sword fight between the forces of Art and Life, between the metaphorical and the literal, the fantastical and the mundane with a wonderful assortment of characters, landscapes, tastes, voices, vintages and weathers. Whether in the company of a latter day Dorian Gray or a small boy plotting revenge against the mob for an act of cruelty against his father, the reader has a sense of an elaborate game being played, of a system of cosmic interconnections coming apart at the seams and of anachronisms collapsing into modernity. This is a collection full of delight and intrigue. -- Annie Freud Rain Rider is thrillingly wide-ranging, a book of echoes and intricacies where you're as likely to meet the Devil as the Fool in poem after glittering poem. Briggs has written a mirror maze of a book you could lose yourself in for a very long time indeed. -- Jacob Polley