Ezra Miles writes ‘against the penumbra of life’, at the edge of things and their natural energy. Written during an isolating period working in a rural signalbox in Lincolnshire, these poems are those of a saint in hermitage. Threnodic and punctuated with diaristic entries, The Signalman imagines what is beyond our singular existence. - Tom Branfoot, author of I'll Splinter.

The Signalman flashes through the darkness of our broken world in poems that "howl against the penumbra of life." The life of the mind, of devotion, and of the exterior world circulate through the lines of Miles' poems like poetic electricity, alive in their music and vivid description, keeping a light on as "the horizon bleeds / into a thin red rain." I haven't read a book of poems that feels like a book, rather than a disparate collection of separate poems, in years, but The Signalman achieves a cohesion that propelled this reader from one poem to the next with pleasure - an incredible achievement.