Alan Morrison is probably best known as the editor of the ground-breaking anthologies Emergency Verse: Poetry in Defence of the Welfare State, and The Robin Hood Book: Verse Versus Austerity. But he is also a prolific critic and a brave and original poet.

His new collection, Shadows Waltz Haltingly (Lapwing, £10) is a record in verse of his mother’s 15-year fight against Huntington’s disease to her death in 2013: “The chorea’s grotesque routines of circus tumbling; / Leaving her husband a pale washed-up clown, / Face-tugging, fuddled by juggling of diagnoses / And ever-switching prescriptions, trick-unicyclists / Passing on batons of appointments between them, / Until the last port of call hit upon the mutant gene / By a smudging margin: this degenerative germinal / Seed might be passed on… and on… far out across / The circular sands and seaweed links to distant tides…”

Because Huntington’s chorea used to be called the St Vitus’s dance, Morrison uses dance-imagery to painfully describe her long physical and mental decline: “Hesitation, Change, Drag, Twitch, Hesitation, Drag, / Twitch, Fasciculation, Change, Drag, Twitch Again, / Judder, Halt, Akinetic-Rigid, Unsteady Gait, Rapid / Progression, Jerky Movements, Arms Flailing, Halt, / Posture Stooping, Drag Trunk Slanting, Halt, Jerk, / Wobble on the balls of the feet, repeat, repeat — / Thus goes the Hesitation Waltz of Huntington’s, / St. Vitus’ Dance, known by other bitter sobriquets — / The Terpsichorean Chorea, the Misfold Fandango, / The Westphal Shuffle, the Basal Ganglia Tango...”