There is nothing fancy in The Year of the Crab; there is nothing fancy about cancer. The power of the poems lies in the simplicity of the language, and the bald yet beautiful and touching observations made by Gordon Meade during the year following his diagnosis: the joy of eating a fresh apricot; the indignities of treatment; meditations on life and death; watching the clear-up after a strong wind that, like the cancer, no one has seen coming.
