According to the seventeenth-century herbarium The Garden of Eden, a missel-child' is a mysterious being found beneath a mistletoe-covered tree – a changeling, perhaps, whereof many strange things are conceived'. Helen Tookey's first full collection of poems starts from the missel-child to explore archaeologies of identity, place and language. She is a formally inventive writer, using collage and syllabics, exploring elegy and myth. The poems in this book create a space in which language enables something to be said and also to be shown.
