Rituals of travel are at the heart of Liz Almond's work; and travel, in her poems, can start anywhere: through a computer screen offering access to a satellite view of continents, to a pencil hovering like a bee at the start of a poem about a zoo for husbands. Departures and arrivals, free exchanges of words at the border controls of language - all these feed into poems that embody a rich and sensual sense of cultural difference, an understanding of the scale and fragility of our planet. And the imaginative routes she opens for us are full of surprises: a gecko may become a mouth-watering feast; a god may step onto a mountain path in homespun wool hunting for her mortal self. Liz Almond's poem journey both ways - into the trials and pleasures of the body, and towards that luminous part of us sensed when we're open to the material riches of a world we must inhabit with respect, or lose.
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