Alison Brackenbury's first collection, Dreams of Power and other poems (1981), was widely praised by reviewers and was a Poetry Book Society recommendation. Subsequent poems earned her a prestigious Gregory Award in 1982; her work has been published in most of the major literary periodicals and frequently broadcast on the radio. There are few comparable women poets in her generation, and none who engages so ambitiously with historical/biographical themes, as in the long title sequences of her collections. Both substantial volumes are evidence of a wide-ranging, dramatic imagination.

Her attitude to autobiographical disclosure is wryly determined: "Have you noticed that in some magazines the biographies are longer than the poems? ... I think biographies encourage self-importance, which poets are prone to in any case--." The few facts at our disposal are that Alison Brackenbury was born in Gainsborough, Lincolnshire, where her father was a farm worker and her mother was...