Early one morning, a writer begins to grow feathers and wings, and may eventually be able to zoom off to work without taking the executive jet. A traveller visiting Porto, in northern Portugal, notices an angel in mid-air, high above. A newcomer to Berlin sits in an airport cafe and reflects on predictions about the future made nearly 50 years ago. After a trip to Docklands, Melbourne, a visitor is haunted by the dockside jellyfish ‘Opening and closing themselves like sinister/ white umbrellas’. And when a man wakes on a beach, memories are revived and he is summoned back to childhood, and to ‘something loved,/ something full of the promise of salty air, as if/ he were a lost and circling seagull, or a lump/ of flying paper whirled up in a glassy tide of wind’. Surprised by Hope is the third book of poetry by Dunedin writer John Gibb, an English honours graduate of Otago University and former crime reporter at the Whanganui Chronicle, who recently retired after more than thirty years as a science and university reporter at the Otago Daily Times.