Girl in the Air

Ellen de Vries was born in Belfast to a Northern Irish mother and a Dutch father. She has lived in many countries including Morocco, Yemen, the Czech Republic, and Romania. Her work draws on these experiences, not as a traveller, but as a perpetual temporary resident.

• Over Strangford Lough 5 Granny gets involved in politics 6 Malin Head 7 Sea view 8 Joop de Vries 10 The problem of invisibility 11 Mushroom Picking 12 Carp 13 Casino, Snowman 14 The problem of the imagination 15 Going home with strangers 16 Breakfast 18 Cut 19 Nabokov's blues 20 Latitude 50:50 North, Longitude 0:06 West 21 Arabic 22

Ellen de Vries is a poet who explores crossroad areas in our lives, places where reality and beyond-reality meet. She often evokes an environment where threat is present, in relationships between parent and child, between lovers; but threat gentled by a lyric originality that surprises and involves the reader at a deep level. Her comprehension of our human longing for possibility and transformation is present everywhere in her poems, poignant and yet imbued with wit. Her language is sheer and confident. See, for instance, her poem Arabic where a pomegranate is shown, beautifully, to exemplify the power and richness of language itself. Penelope Shuttle De Vries's is an essentially European voice, learned with fairy tale and the scatterings of history on everyday life, crystallizing that life without fuss, the poems like jewels that sit comfortably in the hand and hurt just a little. George Szirtes Ellen de Vries works with the quiet precision of a naturalist dissecting a world of ordinary beauty. Side-stepping the shadows of larger stories, her poems explore both the humanity of myth, and the smallness of being human. A touching, intriguing debut. Ros Barber