This is a poem taken from a film that I made with Channel 4 called "The Not Dead," which is about PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and we made the film by interviewing lots of service personnel, people who'd been in the army, and had fought in lots of different conflicts across the decades, and had then come home suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, traumatised by experience that they had and things that they'd seen during conflict. And this poem was written about a soldier called Eddie, and it describes the wound and the course, the journey that a bullet had taken through his body when it had hit him. But I actually wrote it for his wife, Laura, and she read this poem in the film. I thought it was important to have a woman's voice in a film about war. She hadn't fought on the front line, but she had experienced the repercussions of war, as he'd brought them home with him afterwards. And the poems called "The Manhunt," because when she talked about how this round had hit him and it had travelled through his body and come to halt down here somewhere, it was if she was describing a journey that she would have to make herself, if she wanted to bring her husband back, because he'd become lost to her. "The Manhunt." "After the first phase, after passionate nights and intimate days, only then would he let me trace the frozen river which ran through his face, only then would he let me explore the blown hinge of his lower jaw, and handle and hold the damaged, porcelain collar-bone, and mind and attend the fractured rudder of shoulder-blade, and finger and thumb, the parachute silk of his punctured lung. Only then could I bind the struts and climb the rungs of his broken ribs, and feel the hurt of his grazed heart. Skirting along, only then could I picture the scan, the foetus of metal beneath his chest where the bullet had finally come to rest. Then I widened the search, traced the scarring back to its source to a sweating, unexploded mine buried deep in his mind, around which every nerve in his body had tightened and closed. Then, and only then, did I come close." I suppose there's also that sense in the poem that she's following a fuse wire or a trip wire, something very tense, as well as tender in the poem, because he was like a bomb waiting to go off. And the poem's written in couplets, stanzas of two lines each, and that's because it's about two people, it's trying to match the form of the poem with the content, its shape, with its subject matter. And sometimes, those couplets rhyme, and sometimes they're half rhymes, and sometimes they don't rhyme at all, and that's just to try and describe two people who are trying to harmonise with each other, and sometimes they manage it, and sometimes they don't.