I took this book with me for a three month fieldwork trip. It not only continued to offer new things as I read and reread, it seeped into my experiences, offering words of comfort, hope and shared experience. I loved the fact that of the 60 poems Padel has chosen, I had only come across one in another anthology - and Padel had much more to say about it than Goodwin (as would be expected given their very different approaches to poetry). Particular favourites in the collection are hard to choose - and if I have a criticism it would be that Padel has not anthologised one of her own poems here. For me on my travels, the final poem on Orpheus in the underworld was strangely apt as I dealt with new approaches to death in a very different culture. Similarly, a poem about the art of poetry (but perhaps really about the art of keeping living) helped reassure me to keep going! I hope that Padel can continue to publish many more of these works (or even better, that she is again given a regular newspaper column). ( )