Very: New & Selected Poems

Annemarie Austin's vividly imaginative poems explore other worlds and other lives, drawing upon her own memories and experiences, as well as on art, travel, dream, myth, history and literature. Very draws together work from five previous collections, together with a whole collection of new poems. Like all her work, the new poems express a sense of unease, but with added awareness of shifting ground. There is also estrangement and loss of language, as well as a kind of gaiety surfacing through almost desperate word-play, which owe much to the 21st century's alienating climate of fear and suspicion. The book also includes her acclaimed double sequence "Debatable Land", which speaks first of dementia seen from the outside, and then invents a voice for a woman living inside that condition.