Invisible Times sees Mike Jenkins developing further the picture of working-class society in south Wales which he presented so forcefully in his previous book, Empire of Smoke. His use of language and dialect moves still closer to that of his subjects, and the business of their living is written about not from a point of literary detachment, but with gritty involvement.

The poems in this book mix tenderness towards people, particularly the poet’s family, with anger at a society which is at best uncaring and often hostile. The result is a series of almost surrealistic pictures culminating in the title poem, and contrasting intriguingly with the content and compassion of poems in the tradition of Idris Davies.