Dancing Sailors

The title of the collection is the title of a painting by Christopher Wood, one of few paintings that is full of joy and is reproduced on the front cover. In her title poem, Ann Pilling allows her mother, to dance out of the frame . (Like Christopher Wood she committed suicide, at the age of 47.) A small handful of strong, confessional poems inevitably allude to this trauma and its aftermath, but the poems otherwise are positive and celebratory. There is much about the Yorkshire Dales which she calls the country of my heart .