Peter Daniels has long demonstrated his skill as a poet who can write about being a gay man, and he now applies this to the experience of becoming older, finding new love and looking back on how he has reached this point. He recasts the story of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza into a sequence exploring confusion and sanity in a relationship. The poems play with the texture of language, in a stimulating range of forms.

“Equally at home with open forms, ballad or sonnet, always musical, ‘Old Men’ galvanises, entertains and moves by turns. Meditations on mortality and desire and poems about the body with its shames and ecstasies sit intriguingly alongside explorations of the political and historical. This virtuoso collection with its gift of breathless, confident honesty, its beautiful ‘dirty soul’ and its ‘tenderness and filth’ is a rollicking read. Highly recommended.” – Jacqueline Saphra

“Among the old men in his powerful new collection, Peter Daniels accepts his own decline but also welcomes ageing’s new perspectives. Memory flourishes within the older body, as one of its most vital, still functioning organs: ‘our old selves still / enclosed deep inside us’. Even so, the past is past. Daniels’ old gay men still have futures to explore. A long-term relationship comes to an end, opening up fresh opportunities for a body still open to extremes of pleasure and of love. He wryly observes the dignity of age’s indignities and, in a brilliant sequence on Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, how dotage can seem sane and balanced. His language maintains a lastingly erotic interface with the world, and from the old age of his own queerness Daniels derives ample evidence of the reassuring queerness of old age.” – Gregory Woods