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.

An Open Access edition of this book will be available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library on publication. 'Who ever thought they would one day be able to read Malcolm Lowry's fabled novel of the 1930s and 40s, In Ballast to the White Sea? Lord knows, I didn't' - Michael Hofmann, TLS This book breaks new ground in studies of the British novelist Malcolm Lowry (1909-57), as the first collection of new essays produced in response to the publication in 2014 of a scholarly edition of Lowry's 'lost' novel, In Ballast to the White Sea. In their...