‘What poetry must do,’ Jane Cooper has written, ‘is alert us to a truth, and it must be necessary; once it exists, we realize how much we needed exactly this.’ Scaffolding presents Jane Cooper’s new and selected poems gathered over three and a half decades, together with a remarkable autobiographical essay which goes to the heart of the conflicts associated with being a woman and a poet of her generation. Through its generous, imaginative and scrupulous attention to social and artistic truths, Jane Cooper’s writing has never been more necessary.