A stunning achievement. Simultaneously a verse-memoir and a lyrical investigation of the tension between memory (Mnemosyne’s ‘frothing, glinting’) and forgetting (Lethe’s ‘slurry’), complicated by ‘the child that pops out/now and then/ from under the blanket’. This is incredibly beautiful, resonant, hypnotic writing – spare in diction, fragmentary and dream-like in its framing – with subtle undercurrents. Bowery skilfully balances narrative drive with looping timelines, recurrent motifs, and interludes of playful word games and concrete poems which explore sonically and visually this contested, unreliable yet haunting territory.

Melinda Smith

Meditative or whimsical, grounded in the landscape or drifting towards memory, dense or sparse, the poems gathered here deal with contemporary and eternal themes. Their touchstone is a movement of the gaze from self to other, energised by sensuous details. This is poetry that whispers and seduces, nudging at the reader’s ear without being sentimental.

Dominique Hecq