Praise and Poems

Writing since childhood, she was encouraged to publish by writers as diverse as George MacBeth, M. L. Rosenthal, Jonathan Raban and Stevie Smith. More recently she has been championed by Les Murray, the late Alan Ross, and Malcolm Bradbury.

This debut collection, spanning over thirty years, charts her development from the inlaid marquetry of her early work, raised to a voice more bumpy, tangy, flexible. It shelves precipitately from the exquisites of Brighton living: ‘From within this wooden little coffin/crammed with childhood: one acid pencil/green as a boiled sweet, had my name/engraved upon it like an orbituary.’ And plunges to:

Let me decipher your body’s alphabet,
the perfect H of frame and limbs
and eyes of mid-Atlantic grey
that pull me down to the deep sea-bed
of gasping, air-less longing to escape.
Like the pages of unopened Vogue,
your body smells of innocence and crime

Vivid and real, jerky and elliptical poems

Alan Ross, London Magazine

These are intriguing, compelling poems

Neil Astley, Bloodaxe Books

Poems of quality

Les Murray, Quadrant

Everything that I like in poems: simplicity, lucidity and sensitivity – like my favourite Chinese poets – Wang Wei, Tu Fu and Li Po

Graham Ackroyd, Nineties Poetry