The poems in Short Days, Long Nights seize instants of intense feeling just before the action folds in on itself and light changes. They are at their sharpest when catching things which can't and won't last. They trace the obsessions of love: what we glimpse and long for in other people, how we seduce and how we are ourselves seduced. The poems move from country to country and from landscape to landscape, exploring but not coming to conclusions. The people in the poems maintain a flickering, tilting balance between the pull of the ordinary and the charm of the extraordinary and the mysterious. In the end they don't settle for either. They shift and collide against each other, driven by energies they can't predict or fully understand. As well as these unsettling new poems, Short Days, Long Nights includes work from Helen Dunmore's much praised previous collections: The Apple Fall (1983), The Sea Skater (1986), winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, and The Raw Garden (1988), a Poetry Book Society Choice.