Product DescriptionAnnemarie 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.About the AuthorAnnemarie Austin was born in Devon and grew up on the Somerset Levels and in Weston-super-Mare, where has lived for most of her life. She won the Cheltenham Literature Festival Poetry Competition in 1980, and her first collection, The Weather Coming (1987), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. Very: New & Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2008) includes work from all her collections, including On the Border (1993), The Flaying of Marsyas (1995), Door upon Door (1999) and Back from the Moon (2003). She has since published a new collection, Track (2014).