What did we have in common
except our century?
What drew me to them one by one?
Their kindness-or their fury?

An old friend told Jon Stallworthy of her flight from war-torn Poland, carrying in her bedding-roll a coverlet she was embroidering for her fianc� and herself. Her story bears a curious inverse relationship with that of the `Lady of Shalott'. Tennyson's patrician artist in her tower, forced to choose between the world and its `shadows' in her mirror, opts for the world and is destroyed; the peasant artist engages with the world and is sustained by an art that reflects that engagement. The modern story Stallworthy traces over the ghostly outline of the old points a parable about one function of art, what Seamus Heaney calls its power of `redress', in this or any time.

Other poems in this book evoke other women survivors: the poet Anna Akhmatova; the painter Francoise Gilot, Picasso's mistress; a survivor of the siege of Stalingrad. Each poem engages with an earlier one, such as Akhmatova's `Poem Without a Hero' and Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.