Passing Through was John Tripp's first collection of poems for six years.

His many admirers will be pleased to find that he has lost none of his pithiness, or his characteristic style and rhythm. His settings are wide-ranging, from expensive restaurants, market towns, historical sites, bland hotels and concrete universities to library reading rooms, the dole queue, the bus station in Bridgend and a pub in Great Portland Street.

The main preoccupation of the book is the development of Wales in the Eighties. It explores the replacement of the guiding values of the past by consumerism, mass production and the loss of faith, and questions their worth. The results of this change - life seemingly lived without thought for the past or care for others - makes the poet regret that we seem to have lost the ability to pause as we pass through.

John Tripp(1927-1986) was born in Bargoed, Glamorgan. He was a journalist with the BBC, Press Officer at the Indonesian Embassy and an information officer at the Central Office of Information in a varied career. Returning to Wales in the late 1960s he worked as a freelance journalist, and was for some years literary editor ofPlanet. Tripp was a popular performer of his work, and a leading figure in literary affairs in Wales. A short story writer as well as a poet, his previous books includeThe Province of Belief,The Inheritance FileandCollected Poems(1978). A selection of his poetry has also appeared in the Penguin Modern Poets series.