Tessitura, Italian 'texture', borrows a musical conceptual term, denoting the textural sweep of melodic contour-kind of safe-space-for a singer or instrumentalist. This collection is intended as a corresponding writerly-space in which I bring together various drifts of work, assemble them into poetry's visual equivalence of music's soundscape. The poems are grounded-and sometimes take flight from-my comfort-zone roots in the South-West of England-its continuity of personal ancestors and especially its successive memory chain of often forgotten women writers, several of whom make their presence known in the central sequence 'Devon women; Lost W/rites'.