Lemon Hound

As meditative practices focus on the axis of breath, these poems focus on the moment of action, of thought, on the flux of speech.

This is a poetry not of snapshots or collages but of long-exposed captures of the not-so-still lives of women. One sequence imagines Virginia Woolf's childhood; another unmakes her novel The Waves by attempting to untangle its six overlapping narratives. Yet another, On the Scent, ' makes us fl neurs through the lives of a series of contemporary women, while The River Is All Thumbs' uses a palette of vibrant repetition to paint' a landscape.

Queyras's language " astute, insistent, languorous " repeats and echoes until it becomes hypnotic, chimerical, almost halluncinatory in its reflexivity. How lyrical can prose poetry be? How closely can it mimic painting? Sculpture? Film? How do we make a moment firm? These postmodern, ' postfeminist' poems pulse between prose and poetry: the line, the line, they seem to ask, must it ever end?