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An extraordinarily successful collaboration between the Irish poet Paul Muldoon and the acclaimed Scottish photographer Norman McBeath, in which there's an uncanny relationship between word and black-and-white image. Although a McBeath photograph (of a statue of Apollo wrapped in polythene) is directly invoked in one poem, much of the success of this beautifully produced book has to do with indirection and evocation. It's as if this book presents us with a distinctly new genre – photoetry.

 

'Paul Muldoon, who has done so much to reimagine the poet's task, has surpassed himself with his latest collection, Plan B, an exquisitely produced collaboration with Norman McBeath, the Scottish photographer. "I sat one evening with the photographs and copies of the poems and, like the kind of party host we've all been encouraged to believe ourselves to be, allowed them to get into conversation with each other," writes Muldoon of his collection, which, he says, was "curated by the poems and photographs themselves." Typically, he's given this new genre a distinctive new name: photoetry.'

 

Robert McCrum, The Guardian