'There is always a history to the shape of the mind', wrote Jacqueline Rose recently, and one of the continuing preoccupations of these poems has been both to create a sense of the many forms of that shape and to register the history of the worlds which shape it and to which it responds with pleasure, guilt, anger, irony, hatred or love. These are poems which welcome distraction, in various forms, and which seem to have a lasting interest in registering and reproducing a sense of the uncanny. The strategies adopted veer between lyric mannerism and reconstructed second-hand words and, taken together, the poems chart a lazy form of investigative political thinking through the last three decades of the twentieth century and their phenomena.