A British academic brought up among Holland's liquid horizontals, she has something of the Dutch still-life painter's eye: the comprehension of solid form as nothing, finally, but the effect of light. Sensuously wrought and even, at times, subtly erotic, her poems simultaneously evoke another level of pure abstraction, with words in place of coils of paint. This is explicit in the moments when she reflects on the practice of translation, on those many hours she has pored over "the shape of words like the shadows / of doves, settling." Or, more startlingly for a poet, "how not to put two and two together" when verbal faux-amis wait to pounce.