In this highly individual debut collection, poems produce a moving world where metaphor is the rule: a smile is the sun, the heart is a house, a woman is a map, Sleeping Beauty is a man. Delicately nuanced, ambivalent or intense emotional states are explored which shed light on childhood, adulthood and the drama of infantile feelings in adult relationships. In their use of a controlled language of colour and swift movement, and in their refusal of realism, these poems depart from some of the conventions of British poetry. They insist on the image as their vehicle to take the reader around some sharp corners in a vividly three-dimensional sensory world.