Well-known as a stand up comic and folk musician, Mike Harding is now equally known for his rich and varied poetry. Music, place, landscape, politics, memories and stories have always been Mike Harding’s creative touchstones, never more so than in ‘The Lonely Zoroastrian’, his first collection since the 2020 pandemic and lockdown, both of which feature in some of the earlier poems in this book. Storytelling is the essence of his work whether telling the true story of a lost city buried under the ice cap, the curse an old Ukrainian woman laid on a group of Russian soldiers or stories from his beloved Connemara like Islandman and St Luke’s Little Summer. From his ‘little shed of words’ here is Mike Harding ‘singing about the dark times’.