According to the seventeenth-century herbarium The Garden of Eden, a ‘missel-child’ is a mysterious being found beneath a mistletoe-covered tree – a changeling, perhaps, ‘whereof many strange things are conceived’. Helen Tookey’s first full collection of poems starts from the missel-child to explore archaeologies of identity, place and language. She is a formally inventive writer, using collage and syllabics, exploring elegy and myth. The poems in this book create a space in which language enables something to be said and also to be shown.

I

Then is it true 

At Burscough, Lancashire 

Prints 

Estuarine 

Shavuot 

Cockleshells 

Poem for Sabine 

Magnolia 

Among Alphabets 

Fox-Seers 

Autumn Child 

II

Missel-Child 

Unadopted 

Funeral and Fox 

At the Castle 

Water, its Voicings 

Katherine 

In a Richer Mine 

Shilling Visit 

Cedar 

Among the Gods (Persephone) 

III

Male Nude by R.B. Kitaj 

Mono 

Portrait of a Young Woman 

With Joe on Silver Street

Der Tod in Venedig 

The Hardened Criminals of Tomorrow 

When I was quite small I would sometimes dream 

Miss Yamada Has Gotten Married 

America 

A long war, and now the returning 

IV

Fosse Way 

Hollow Meadows 

Persephone in Adiyaman 

Philadelphus 

Rheidol Valley 

Priest 

Heron 

In the dying days of the year we walked 

Secret Name 

Climbing the Hill at Sunset