Iona Lee’s debut collection charts the journey of the writer, artist and performer into adulthood. Written in a unique voice, Iona playfully toys with thematic devices in this entertaining exploration of art and artifice, absence and impermanence, truth and tale telling. Characterised by a deep love of language, its music and its magic, these poems reflect on memory, the future and other hauntings. Wittily observed, this collection is an attempt to connect the stars into tidy constellations, and to join the tiny, inchoate dots of self into something traceable and translatable.

Humorous and self-aware, gentle and philosophical, Anamnesis is written in the knowledge that in telling one’s life-story, one creates it.

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Section I
  • Taking a Thought for a Walk
  • Lifting the Skirt
  • A Thousand Little Lives
  • The Simulation Game
  • Object Theatre
  • The Black Cat
  • Gallus
  • The Past Is Just a Tale We Tell
  • Suspend Your Disbelief
  • Beneath the Dead Man Mountain
  • We Two, Haloed, Hued
  • Notation
  • Lullaby For the Ferryman
  • Balancing
  • Girls
  • Bouncy Castles
  • In Lucie’s Cabin
  • The Gardener
  • I Echo
• Section II
  • The Big Dark
  • You Burn Me
  • Spell for Revelry
  • Play Thing
  • An Image of an Image of an Image
  • Abandon
  • Outpour
  • The Magic Word
  • Clink
  • Augmented Reality
  • Things That Are
  • View From a Train Window
  • On Receiving Unsolicited Poetry From Men That I Have Never Met
  • A One-Sided Conversation (i)
  • A One-Sided Conversation (ii)
  • Downfall
  • Anamnesis
  • Thin Place
  • Small World
  • Haruspex
  • Graveyards and Gardens
  • Nocturne
  • Love Poem
  • Morning After Elegy
  • Bowerbird
• Acknowledgements