Writing in Poetry Review Roddy Lumsden found cause to praise David Wheatley's wilfully impressive form and rampaging vocabulary', while in the TLS Peter Reading commended his technical resources as an unobtrusive pleasure to read'. A Nest on the Waves, taking its title from the folk belief that petrels lay their eggs at sea, ruminates on themes of travel, leave-taking and displacement. From his native County Wicklow by way of East Yorkshire where he lives, the poems trace an arc of excursions, actual or imagined, to Australia, Africa and Antarctica. Migrant workers, migrating birds and nomadic tribes enact something of the drama of where home might be. From shamanism to the lives of saints, responses to the Donegal gaeltacht and homages to musical heroes (Brad Mehldau, Ali Farka Touré), David Wheatley's curious, wide-ranging and now often open-ended verse gives grounds for Maria Johnston's observation in the Dublin Review of Books that the sense of possibility in Wheatley's work seems limitless'.
