Was It for This: Poems

But there is also the wider, collective experience to contend with, the upheaval of historic events and present disaster. "Tenants" is an elegy for Grenfell Tower, written from the perspective of a new mother living a few streets away. Elsewhere, from the terraces and precincts of seventies and eighties London to the late-at-night decks of American suburbs, intimately inhabited geographies provide reference points and sites for revisiting.

Nothing is too small or unlovely to be transfixed by the poet's attention, from the thin concrete pillars of an overpass to an elderly peacock's broken train. There is a memorializing strain in the forensic accumulation of detail, but there is also celebration, a keen sense of holding on to and cherishing what we can.