This is the ‘launch’ poem of Angela Leighton’s fifth collection, One, Two (Carcanet, January 2021). It opens a volume, both formal and free, of memories and elegies, dreams and translations, quirky tributes to the natural world and anguished lyrics about breath and breathlessness in times of plague.

In addition to critical books about poetry from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries, most recently Hearing Things: The Work of Sound in Literature (2018), she has published short stories, translations, and four other volumes of verse with Shoestring and Carcanet Presses. Her half-Italian background takes her south when possible; her university work keeps her sane when poetry won’t play.