Ruth Padel’s passionate and daring new collection is a woman’s eye view of a love affair. Shifting between vulnerability and guilt, innocence and doubt, tenderness and frustration, teasing reproach and the exaltation of deep love and sexual happiness, Padel’s extraordinarily bold and intimate book explores the complexity of emotions that go with falling in love. Wonderfully versatile in tone, it blends the lyrical and the colloquial, darkness and light, seriousness and wit, myth and the Spice Girls. It includes the poem that won the 1996 National Poetry Competition ‘Icicles round a tree in Dumfriesshire’.