The Drummer is Ian Wedde's eighth collection and it is plump with exquisite visual images, lost faith in language, revelations of intense beauty and literary allusions (from the Romantics to the New Zealand tradition). This is what the author writes about his collection: 'The word 'transport' seems to me to describe an event anywhere between a bus-trip and a vision. The dogged example of Odysseus in one margin, the raptures of language in another. The bliss of movement, the transport of dreams. The word romance is uniting gravity and desire. It is the romance I wanted for poems and these are the few poems that got there.'