A Suburb of Heaven is a collection built from observation and speculation. Based on artist Stanley Spencer's work in the first section and the part-imagined life of Anna O, patient zero of psychoanalysis, in the second, it is a feast for the senses. Spencer's predilection for using Biblical scenes in a rural context carries a narrative impetus that Pnina Shinebourne builds on to create revelatory poetic highs, "half-way between drunkenness and reverie." These moments of altered reality perhaps lead inevitably to the sequence on Anna O, which starts with the curiously apt line,...