Deck Shoes is a book of influences and enthusiasms about poetry and the writing life, in which everyday objects and experiences — pencils, a notebook, going for a swim — sit alongside meditations on illness and ageing mortality. In these short, lyrical essays Anthony Wilson honours the debt of gratitude he feels to poets, writers and artists who have made their mark on his imagination. Through them a wry and complex portrait unfolds of the different roles a poet plays, from performer to friend, father to academic.