I The features have become familiar: the spare lines, the pertinent adjectives, the surprise juxtapositions. The physical world also: lonely rooms, problematic spaces, broken cityscapes. We meet the speaker at some place of disjunction, putting together attempts at a grand image of the world while remaining sceptical of any such attempt, and all the time drawing on small resources of mood or opinion. Her words confront us with their unpleasant reminders that the world is not ordered as we would care to believe, and signposts are not just signposts but themselves constructions fraught with ambiguity. Men are strange, to say the least. People’s motives are rarely entirely sincere. Drugs and addictions are never far from the scene, even on a dry day. Poems are in need of something, express the need, are driven by the need, whatever that need may be. Sometimes the need is named, other times guessed at, often a matter of uncertainty even to the author. Sometimes lines ha