The Abbotsford Convent becomes more than the setting, 'the grey mince-meat walls', of this collection. It emerges as presence, intimate and familiar as well as constraining and forbidding. But it is childhood itself which becomes the subterranean geography and pulse. Subject to an overworld of lay and religious adults, 'the razor of power having such adult force', the voices in these poems create multiple pathways through memory and time as they map and navigate the many-stranded mysteries of their institutionalised lives.