She escaped to grammar shcool via that stock-in-trade, the wonderful 11+ teacher, and began to exercise demons in small magazines just as she was educated at the University of Birmingham and East Anglia.

After a career in Fine Arts working in the V&A and Paul Mellon Foundation, her sense of catalogue raisonnés began to shape her life.

Amanda Sewell's appearance in book form has been awaited for over three decades, most recently after multiple appearances in the last issues of the late London Magazine.

This debut collection, spanning over thirty years, charts her development from the inlaid marquetry of her early work, raised to a voice more bumpy, tangy, flexible. It shelves precipitately from the exquisites of Brighton living: 'From within this wooden little coffin/crammed with childhood: one acid pencil/green as a boiled sweet, had my name/engraved upon it like an orbituary.' And plunges to:

Let me decipher your body's alphabet,
the perfect H of frame and limbs
and eyes of mid-Atlantic grey
that pull me down to the deep sea-bed
of gasping, air-less longing to escape.
Like the pages of unopened Vogue,
your body smells of innocence and crime -

Vivid and real, jerky and elliptical poems
Alan Ross, London Magazine

These are intriguing, compelling poems
Neil Astley, Bloodaxe Books

Poems of quality
Les Murray, Quadrant

Everything that I like in poems: simplicity, lucidity and sensitivity - like my favourite Chinese poets - Wang Wei, Tu Fu and Li Po
Graham Ackroyd, Nineties Poetry