Pigeon Songs is Derry-born Eoghan Walls' second collection of poems from Seren after his much-praised debut, The Salt Harvest. From the first piece, `Angry Birds' we have a sense of the poet's themes and preoccupations: we have a richly metaphorical and densely allusive style, a pull towards formal metre and structures. There is also the occasional vigorous vulgarity, adding a touch of blue humour to the canvas, breaking up the formal rigour. Family is a potent presence in poems inspired by parents, grandparents, partners, children. They often emit a sort of energy, a fierce gravitational pull of emotion around the burning heart of a poem ultimately about love, or the sorrow of losing a loved-one. There is frequently a strangeness that can be both comic, as in the `The Tooth Burier', inspired by a child's reaction to a lost tooth, and eerie as in `The Weight of Her' where the child whispers that `she wishes to be dead'. Parenthood weighs large as alternately joyful, terrifying and essential to everyday existence. Also here is a richly imagined and mourned-for natural world as in `Ice Bear Dreams'; `The Sins of the Otter'; `The Beast of the Galapagos'; as well as animals in hybrid, mythological attitudes: `The Frog Prince'; `When All the Men Turned into Geese' and the ever-present Pigeons who recur throughout the book as totems for various states of inquisition, rumination, urban living and means of temporary liberation from the mundane.