End Ceremonies by Stuart McPherson is at times tender, at times wounded, the poems exploding outwards into a galaxy of miraculous imagery and "an infinitude of Octopus eyes". The themes are often dark, fighting bare fisted with the dualities found within self-discovery and identity, but written in such compelling, haunted, and hypnotic tones, that the work becomes irresistible. These are poems of closure and rebirth, where the "shapes of ghosts demand to be exorcised"