Missel-Child - Softcover

Her quiet, precise poems have a genuine eeriness. She has interests in both archaeology and psychology, but knows intuitively that they aren't separate - that when we dig up the past it's our own roots we are looking at. --Grevel Lindop

The diction is unexpected, apt and deeply satisfying, focusing the reader not only on the words chosen, but also on the ghosts and resonances of those that might have been there. --Carola Luther

Missel-Child is an exceptional volume. Some of the subject-matter is 'found', some comes from a powerful and intelligent imagination and from keen observation. All is embodied in a language that is sensuous and strong. --Jeffrey Wainwright

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.