Priest Skear is Tim Liardet’s seventh collection of poems. Taking as its starting point the drowning of twenty-three Chinese cocklepickers in Morecambe Bay in 2004, this extended sequence is a haunting allegory of personal risk and of a social malaise which, in Liardet’s vision, reaches from the day-to-day oppression of migrant workers to the Fourth Estate and to Parliament itself. The sea’s terrors, horrifically foregrounded, become the lens through which the features of contemporary racism are refracted.