Picador, 2019, 41 p. lllustrated by David De Las Heras.

This, like The Christmas Truce, is one of Duffy’s Christmas poems. It is inspired by the frost fairs that took place on the River Thames in London during the Little Ice Age when people erected tents, stalls and even set fires on the frozen river during winter.

Duffy’s female narrator disguises herself as a man and wanders through the town describing the scenes she sees and eventually ventures onto the ice (not without initial mishap) to immerse herself in the goings-on, before spending the night sleeping on the river.

Usually the three lines at the end of the irregularly sized stanzas are rhymed.

David De Las Heras’s illustrations could be described as cartoonish, consisting as they do of blocks of colour, but they are effective in conveying the atmosphere and their crowd scenes in particular are reminiscent of Brueghel.