Poetry. Reality and escapism, protection and peeling away, prayer and sacrilege, resistance and surrender. Navigating an often complex and uneven playing field, Colin Dardis strives to find balance from a life constantly fluctuating between profit and loss. The poems on offer here explore questions of existence and identity, asking who we really are, and how we can possibly be. In THE X OF Y, Colin Dardis is a poetry sleuth, a gentle but dedicated interrogator of humanness; a subtle seeker-sifter who works to uncover and carefully examine evidence taken from the yin and yang of everydayness, from the daily dust of our routines and interactions with those around us, especially with those we hold dear. And, like all good sleuths, he invariably gets his wo/man.--Adrian Rice The poetry of Colin Dardis is multi-tonal. He can be tender or enraged, applying his observant eye and attuned ear to the every-day and the eternal and treating each with the same seriousness. His is a humane voice in a world of increasing dissonance, where identity politics threaten to overwhelm and dehumanise, where the kerbstone and telegraph pole blind too many to the real lives behind, where salvation may just lie in the revealed glory of a peeled boiled egg.--Nessa O'Mahony