If ever you wanted a voice warm and enveloping as sun baked earth, here it is. But if you want gentle thoughts and pretty images, this is not what you’ll find. Phillippa’s poems come from a place of deep emotional insight and connection to her world. One that has turmoil in its history and also its present, and through which people do ordinary things; they grow up, fall in love, become mothers, and they manage the hopes, dreams, and despairs of their lives. Ordinariness written and narrated extraordinarily. And while Phillippa’s Origin closes the book, her last word opens the deepest of chasms.