"Touchwood" is Dick Davis' first collection since "Devices and Desires: New and Selected Poems" (1989), which Wendy Cope selected as her book of the year in the "Sunday Times", calling it 'the year's most underrated poetry book'. The clarity and elegance of his lyrics, intimate and personal in tone, combined with his precise yet natural language, is undiminished. But there is a more relaxed feel to the book with the presence of epigrams and satirical poems like "A Translator's Nightmare" in which the poet-translator is confronted in the underworld by the poets he translated or failed to translate. The book concludes with a brilliant, funny and moving retelling of the story of Esther and Mordecai.