Ida Affleck Graves was first published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf as a Hogarth Living Poet, in 1929. Later, in the '50s, novels and children's books appeared from Faber. There followed a silence, during which she continued to write poems, but stuffed them into a drawer - a silence eventually broken by A Kind Husband (OxfordPoets, 1994). Five years later comes this collection, of nearly all new poems, published in the poet's 98th year. The recent poems are as vigorous, musical, funny and vivid as ever, on her favourite topics: her childhood (sent from India to an English boarding-school, separated from her adored, pleasure-seeking mother); on animals and birds, and the wild garden of the sixteenth-century weavers' house in Suffolk where she lives since before the War. The collection ends with a group of direct and moving poems about death.