But once she was married and the mother of two small daughters, happy if she could jot down just one line or one image, that was not her life. Her days now revolved round cooking, washing up, nappies, feeds; lifting the kettle to the gas stove, setting her skirt over a chair to have it without creases for the morning. They were full of small untidinesses and oversights which assumed huge importance, like the loaf forgotten by the cash register, or washing left wet.

Other "women's subjects" needed tackling more forcefully. She had no qualms about that. The whole poetic tradition had to be scrubbed and abraded with the wash stones of resistance. So an anorexic torched her witch-body, its "curves and paps" until, "thin as a rib", she could slip back into Adam again, "as if I had never been away". A menstruating woman confronted the moon, "dulled by it/ thick with it…a water cauled by her light…barren with her blood."

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