`Michael and Sasha were together for thirty-five years,' writes Sophie Young in the introduction to this unusual `collaborative' volume. Poems by two writers better known in other fields-Sasha Moorsom as a novelist, translator and broadcaster, Michael Young as a distinguished social thinker-are interleaved to reconstruct the dialogue of lives led in a world of love, family, travel and public affairs. Sasha Moorsom died of cancer in 1993.


`The idea of publishing my parents' poems together arose from a comment Sasha made in the last week of her
life,' writes their daughter Sophie. `My father had just written a poem, "Cancer", and I asked her what she thought of it. She was it was very good and that it was the other half of her poem "Body", which was in a bedside notebook and was one of the last she wrote. Looking through her poems after she died I could see how many connections there were with those of Michael. The poems chronicle the major themes and events in their lives, often echoing each other, unintentionally perhaps but all the same they can be seen or heard as complementary reflections. Rather than arranging them in chronological order, it is these echoes that I have tried to listen to in placing the poems where they are in your collection.'


Your head in Mine is a unique record of two lives answering one another, rich in human warmth, oblique harmony, endurance and love.