This book will be released on November 1st 2026.
Pre-orders are charged at time of order and the book will be posted to you as soon as it becomes available.
UK postage is 99 pence per order.
Introduced by Jasmine Donahaye
‘A truly marvellous book’ – The Independent
‘No doubt the subject matter of mourning is one of the many ways that readers will come to this book who might otherwise know nothing about the author. If The Presence is the introduction to his writing, it serves as a good one: restrained in expression, and yet more frank, more open, more vulnerable than anything he published before.’ – Jasmine Donahaye
Several months after the death of poet Dannie Abse’s wife, Joan, in a car accident, he began to write a diary which is both a record of present grief and a portrait of a marriage that lasted more than fifty years. It is an extraordinary document, painful but celebratory, funny yet often tragic, bursting with joy as well as sorrow and full of a deep understanding of what it means to be human.
Dannie Abse (1923-2014) was born in Cardiff. He began his medical studies at the Welsh National School of Medicine and qualified as a doctor from Westminster Hospital, London in 1950. While still a student, Abse’s first book of poems was published and his first play performed. Further poetry volumes followed over the decades, culminating in his final collection Speak, Old Parrot in 2013 (shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize) and Ask the Moon: New and Collected Poems 1948-2014. His first novel, Ash on a Young Man’s Sleeve, appeared in 1954 and his most recent, the Booker longlisted The Strange Case of Dr Simmonds and Dr Glas in 2002. Three prize-winning plays were collected in The View from Row G (1990) and his autobiography, Goodbye, Twentieth Century, was published in 2001. Recognised internationally as a poet, Abse was President of the Poetry Society and of the Welsh Academy of Letters, and among his awards were the Wales Book of the Year for The Presence, the Wilfred Owen Award and the Roland Mathias Prize. He was appointed a CBE in 2012.