Beginning With Your Last Breath

Beginning With Your Last Breath, the debut poetry collection by Roy McFarlane, explores love, loss, adoption and identity in precise and emotionally-charged poetry. From bereavement comes forth a life story in poems; the journey of sons, friends, lovers, parents, and all the moments of growing-up, discovery, falling in and out of love, and learning to say goodbye that come along the way. 

Themes of place, identity, history, and race are interwoven with personal narratives in poems that touch on everything from the ‘Tebbit Test’ and Marvin Gaye to the Black Country, that ‘place just off the M6’. McFarlane’s poems are beautifully focused and crafted, moving their readers between both the spiritual and the sensual worlds with graceful, rapturous hymns to the transformative power of love.