Every time we touched each other, we left a fingerprint of sweat,
the grass died back, the hens stopped laying.
and on the fig tree outside my bedroom the figs ripened.
That summer we read girlie magazines spilling beer
on my white sheets and over the pages of Penthouse.
His big body was as pale as a parsnip, black hairs sprouted
in unlikely places but his hands were like talc and
I loved his unhappiness, his migranes.

I'd always had boys before, stumbling through their paces
lights off and everything, even their knees, strange in the dark.
This was so different, like learning to swim
after years of walking your hands in the shallows
fooling nobody.
Look, now I can backstroke and butterfly,
I can dive from the high tower.

He opened me like an oyster,
like an artichoke. I was brine and undertow when he broke
over me, his hands full of music, each finger
singing a note purer than sainthood.

I swaggered into the year wearing that song
never again so unkowing,
never again so electric.

Catherine Bateson's new poetry collection has at its centre three lively sequences that address the hard graft of piritual negotiation. Imagined for present, past and future times, each of them tracks the slow and the sudden dissolution of love - yet love stories they are. Her characters are distinctly and originally conceived, with a habitual storyteller's craft.

Fore and aft of those sequences are some poems that are more directly reflective. 'Marriage' is the familiar here - or at least the otherness of daughterhood, motherhood, and being a lover. 'Beginners', it is suggested, is what we remain.

These poems are wise, unillusioned and generous, reminding us that 'each morning/ the fat eye of love/ winks us back'. The poetry throughout has a confident grasp of telling images, and of tonal and rhythmical tact.

ODE TO MY DOCS

As graceful as camels, these shoes,
round-toed, innoent.
See how they gape
affronted by that stiletto's lewd invitation.
Even the new wild cherry suede
with peekaboo cut-outs
can't glamour this orthopedic pair.
Like horses (clop clop)
grazing at mild grass in all weathers
or nuns prayerfully wearing a quiet path
round and round the convent garden
these guleless shoes sturdy as Highland calves
decorous as a first date
tramp solidly through their daily chores.
My feet slip into old-fashioned, broad-shouldered words.
These shoes do not admit temporary flirtations.
These virtuos shoes say
in callous, bunion, blister and corn
in sleet, mud and sweat
I do, I do.