Julia Copus's vision is remarkably mature for a writer still in her twenties. In The Shuttered Eye, her first collection, she encompasses the whole span of life, through birth and parenthood to abandonment, break-up and death. Her song is one of rage against fear, a restless search for fulfilment, and in its singing she inhabits a world peopled with strangely familiar characters from myth, legend and fairytale to throw the turmoil of love and family relationships into sharp relief. In these highly musical and delicately wrought poems, she captures the pain of resignation and the pangs of lost love, while balancing decay and disappointment with renewal and rebirth. Wounds are not always healed nor dreams achieved, but true contentment is always tantalisingly close at hand, glimpsed through the shadowy half-light of the shuttered eye. Poetry Book Society Recommendation.