If you’re fancying some romanticism in your life, you could certainly do worse than this slim pamphlet of poesy. Self-published by poet and translator, Peter Manson, it provides an elegant route into the poetry of Gautier, one of the most significant figures of the 19th century French literary and artistic worlds. Influenced by his lifelong friend Gérard de Nerval, Gautier’s work went on to influence figures like Baudelaire, Proust, Wilde and Eliot. The translator Manson, a stallworth of the British alternative poetry scene, is a trustworthy guide and who could resist this description of day-dreaming poets: “They walk without aim and take a thousand false steps;/they bump into passers-by, are crushed by wheels,/or fall into potholes they failed to see.”