'A Kind Husband' is the staunch and mysterious title of one of the poems in this new collection by Ida Affleck Graves. Born in India in 1902, her work was first published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf in 1929, as no. 5 of the Hogarth Living Poets.

'Epithalamium', with wood-engraving by her artist husband Blair Hughes-Stanton (with whom she had set up the Gemini Press), won the top literary award at the Venice Bienniale in 1937. During the war, Graves scene-painted and sewed costumes for the Covent Garden National Ballet. Mother and Child, a long poem, was published in 1945 by the Fortune Press, and later, in the fifties, she published two novels and three children's books with Faber.

She continued to write poems regularly over the years, and they convey with a wonderful consistency the freshness of her observations of, for instance, men, childhood, animals, with a great artfulness of language and cadence, often humorous, sometimes profoundly sad.