Lorna Thorpe's poetry has a facility for the clinching final line, the stylish dismount which might pall as a manoueuvre were it any less accomplished in practice. The collection moves from mental to physical illness, then to the mental and physical engagements (and tribulations) of love. Expressed with a tough, sometimes sardonic directness, the collection describes a trajectory from darkness to light which inevitably has less powerful things to say about the brighter end of the spectrum, if only because fire and meltdown tend to have the best tunes: