Beautiful Is Enough  (Westwords 1993) 

BEAUTIFUL IS ENOUGH ranges from prison to music, politics and sex. At its centre is a sardonic yet poignant sequence on a marriage's failure and an ensuing love affair. This unusual, outspoken collection of poems from a controversial writer — also known as a novelist and translator — includes prose-poems and translations from the French.

“I found a great deal to satisfy me in this current collection… So much close to your experience – yet the controlling wit and voice always there. Very accessible, very readable” [William Oxley] 

“I have now finished reading Beautiful Is Enough, with interest for its energetic determination to retrieve some of the lost virtues of rhyme and measure” [Harry Kemp] 

“The employment here of quite intricate rhyming patterns has clearly brought the best out of him. Lykiard himself calls the use of rhyme ‘a form of survival technique’: certainly it has helped him to articulate pain and hope in language of considerable poignancy. A moving sequence, in a stimulating volume” [Glyn Pursglove, Acumen]