In wide-ranging prose Patrick McGuinness – poet, novelist, editor, critic, translator – attends generously to the humdrum: shopping centres, ears, varieties of luggage and language, ‘minor’ writers and artists, hybrid forms (‘a genre somewhere between inventory and lyric’) without official pedigree. Loss and departures are always part of the weather of stations, but in his alertness to what is simply there, and therefore largely invisible, McGuinness articulates and honours what is most contemporary – ‘the bit between the too late and the too early which is also called now’.