A Night on the Lash is a volume of original poetry written over a period of six years. Many of the poems have appeared in literary magazines and the collection was rigorously selected from a much greater body of work produced over the six years. The book has been favourably reviewed in leading literary journals. The research content of a book of poems of this kind is best described as a form of intensive action-research, since each poem has its provenance in personal experience. These experiences are, though, linked to external forces as the poems range across a wide range of themes and seek to relate individual sensibility to historical and political events. This is a reflexive process in which rigorous drafting and re-drafting take place and in which the testing of poems against literary journals results in their publication and final selection. The work itself ranges from short lyrics to long poems and poem-sequences, and from free verse to stricter forms. The significance of the collection lies in the melding of rural and urban settings with personal and political material to produce a catholic range of poetic expression. RAE_import_type : Authored book RAE_uoa_type : English Language and Literature