Signs Round a Dead Body is the eagerly awaited follow-up to Deryn Rees-Jones’s widely acclaimed first collection, The Memory Tray. Her humour, sharp technique and preoccupation with the dilemmas of women are as apparent as ever, but there is now a more intense personal focus.

Love, in all its permutations, suffuses this book, and sensuous details abound: from poems like ’Making Out’ and ’From His Coy Mistress’, about the fears and vacillations of love, to the disillusionment of the Nerudian ’Songs of Despair.’ Informed by a sensibility at once passionate, intelligent and ironic, this new collection confirms Rees-Jones’s place at the forefront of contemporary poetry.