After Hours explores mortality and transience in the lives of Irish migrants that settled in England in the first half of the 20th century, and the generations that followed them. At the heart of this collection is an elegiac sequence of poems in memory of David Cooke's father-in-law, a larger than life Irishman who met illness and death with good-humoured resilience.

David Cooke was born in the UK in 1953 to a family that comes from the West of Ireland. He won a Gregory Award in 1977, while still an undergraduate at Nottingham University. After publishing his first full poetry collection in 1984, he then wrote no poetry for two decades, during which time he was Head of Modern Languages in a large comprehensive school in Cleethorpes. Subsequently, he earned his living as an online bookseller, but is now happily retired. He is married with four grown-up children.