Eleanor Cooke has created a new apocrypha, a feminist version of the Annunciation. Under the taut surface of the poetry, the themes of love and loss are woven into a sequence of power. New myths - both reverent and outrageous - replace what the poet sees as the irrelevances of the Virgin Birth. The reader can hear the voice of real women in the poems, and, in the angel of the Annunciation, the grief of lost innocence. This book is a celebration of passionate human love that succeeds in healing the rift between the sexual and the sacred.