Steve Griffiths is one of very few English language poets to come out of Anglesey. Civilised Airs divides into poems of love and those of social concern. The former show a delicacy and tenderness in the personal world of the poet, the latter a controlled anger at the position of fragile human beings in a hard and disinterested society. Together they illustrate implicitly the distance which has developed between the private individual and the public world he inhabits. The poems as a whole are marked by astute observations, vivid imagery, toughness, a wry humour and elegant use of words.