‘Masculine Happiness’ is the thoughtful and winning debut collection from the Wales-based poet David Foster-Morgan. Complex, ironic, layered, fashioned with an acute and subtle intelligence, these poems are as likely to reference Elvis as Borges. They are also likely to unsettle the reader with their array of unpredictable and frequently sinister voices and events. Many of the author’s formal strategies are modernist: prose and shaped and ‘found’ pieces are included. There are a number of sonnet-length poems that develop a characteristically dark and paradoxical view of nature: part rapture, part horror. As well as being subject to this uneasy natural world, his characters also move through history, and come to represent, and frequently satirize, the many sorts of masculine responses to the challenges of the 20th and 21st centuries.