Praise and Poems

People are at the heart of Helen Oswald’s wise and humane poems. With skill and delicacy she explores the complex web of relationships which define our place in the world. The book is shot through with images of connection and separation as people travel to and with and from each other. There are moving poems of loss but these are tempered by poems which celebrate the possibility of intimacy. In all the work there is an unsentimental yet tender fascination with our ‘second-hand planet’ and how we make our lives on it

Esther Morgan

Helen Oswald’s poems are edgy but delicate. Her overdue collection displays wit and warmth, yet she enters difficult areas where her empathy and understatement are displayed to powerful use

Roddy Lumsden