Ruth Silcock’s third collection continues in cheerful vein about often less than cheerful subjects. She has the knack of combining jaunty traditional forms with sometimes startling or even grim subject matter. Her poems focus on the lives of ordinary people – children, vicars, orphans, nurses, grannies, social workers at a dance, old people in residential homes – and she treats their stories with compassion and humour.

Born in Manchester in 1926, Ruth Silcock read English at Girton College, Cambridge, and later became a psychiatric social worker, working with both adults and children. She has published several children's books. Her previous collections of poems Mrs. Carmichael (1987) and A Wonderful View of the Sea (1996) were also published by Anvil. A successful radio play, 46 Nursing Homes, was based on a sequence of her poems.