Anne-Marie Fyfe's poems have long dwelt on the role that the spaces we inhabit, the places in which we find security, play in our lives: House of Small Absences is an observation window into strange, unsettling spaces - a deserted stage-set, our own personalised 'museum', a Piedmont albergo, underground cities, Midtown roof-gardens, convent orchards, houseboats, a foldaway circus, a Romanian sleeper-carriage - the familiar rendered uncanny through the distorting lenses of distance and life's exigencies, its inevitable lettings-go - The book opens with 'The Red Aeroplane' where witnessing an apparent plane crash sparks a vertiginous sequence of image and memory, 'the way sureties tilt and untangle'. We know that we will follow the author in exploring not just specific places and memories but the 'exponential function of tangents', all that is implied and suggested. Some poems beguile with mysterious pageants or processions. 'Honey and Wild Locusts' offers us a curious inventory of objects: 'in-patients' marching in 'Florentine masks' and 'beekeeper veils'. These baroque surfaces are both satire and demonstration of a complicated 21st century full of dark conflicts and temptations. Liminal states, such as the insomnia permeating 'The Outer Provinces of Sleep', also suit the peculiar physics of these dream-like poetic rooms. There are also a series of shorter poems that, in a direct tone of address, simpler language and intent, counterpoint the richness and density of the longer poems. These, such as 'Winnower' speak to an opposing pragmatic viewpoint: "Everyone can use a listener, who/ won't demur, pass judgement, won't/ agree necessarily." There is a winning intimacy to these shorter poems, they clear our palates and prepare us for the longer, more involved set pieces with all of their carefully delineated and often darkly gorgeous imagery such as the terrifying bees in 'Before the Swarm': "The cloud-level shoal with their vivid insignia".

Poems by Nell Keddie, Maggie Sullivan, Susan Utting, Allison McVety, Paul Merchant, Sam Riviere, Michael Swan, Siriol Troup and others in the adult section from a National Competition; young prize-winners from Kent and Sussex ( Sophie Goodall, Sam Green, Jennifer Leach, Katy Dye, Charles Hooper, Christian Mueller annd others)

Since first appearing in Late Crossing in the late Nineties, Anne-Marie Fyfe's life studies have focused increasingly on the disconcerting underside of small-town and suburban banality, on the underlit corners of apartments, waiting rooms, underpasses, on doppelgangers and stand-ins, on clandestine, undercover operations and escapades. So many cherished objects, long forgotten or only half-recollected, so many places on the verge of mattering, so many lives spent rehearsing for moments that never arrive: Understudies brings together new poems of optimism and isolation, of assumed and confused identities, with some of the poems from The Ghost Twin, Tickets from a Blank Window and Late Crossing that first brought readers into this world of lives at once chaotic and oddly consolatory that lie below placid surfaces.