Loss and memory. The poems of the first section of Irish poet Leeanne Quinn's debut collection explore the intimacies of a sibling relationship, and revisit it from a distance travelled since, where new experience is "the earth's irreproachable / response to your absence." Other poems intersperse this main narrative, inspired by a variety of subjects, from Gertrude Stein to the Drogheda-born artist Nano Reid, natural disasters to the complex territory of broken relationships. Pain is evoked, sensed never far from the surface, but the telling remains oblique, the particulars refusing a simple...