Composed in three movements—preludes, variations and fugue—Daughter is an exploration of what being the daughter means for the poet and her parents, recognising that there is so much of our parents’ lives that is barely glimpsed, that is pieced together from stories.

What was it like to live through the Second World War beside the Thames in London? How can the writer celebrate her parents’ lives and mourn their deaths through her own development as a poet? How can she express love for those she thinks of constantly?

For Patricia Helen Wooldridge, inspired by Virginia Woolf’s A Sketch of the Past, the answers are acts of imagination, merging memoir with poetry. Lyrical, seasonal, walking in landscape, soaring with birds and full of flowers, Daughter paints the world of parents and poet through a collage of memories. Tender, poignant, balancing the enormity of loss with the vastness of love and, crucially, demonstrating the grace of poetry to meld past and present, this is an exquisite and heart-felt collection.