The poems of The Poison Colour, Maureen Hynes's fourth collection, while moving onto more experimental ground than her previous works, retain her strong, personal voice. Looking through "the peepshow of the past," she finds the essential question: what makes us human. Beads from a broken necklace, a rosary, bounce down the centuries to link Hynes's mother's life with women's lives from earliest times. In our cities, traces of forgotten places and people: like the artists of the arte povera movement, Hynes attends to the "poor materials" of daily life, whether intimate or public - plywood and concrete, tarpaulin and wool, clay and asphalt. What poisons us? What enlivens us? Can one element do both? Here "the elements shift from breath to roar, warmth to sear, solid to quake. Consolation to destruction."