Publisher's Synopsis
In this new group of poems Carol Rumens explors the strange gingerbread house where she lived as a child - in suburban south London: "This gingerbread house was in a rather urban forest - Forest Hill, south-east London in fact. Red-brick, Edwardian, end-of-terrace, it belonged to my maternal grandparents and was where, with my own parents, I spent my early childhood. We moved away when I was 11, so that the house and its network of lives becanme sealed off together with the child I had outgrown. I have tried to open doors to a few of its rooms, and to explore them with an adult objectivity that is still rooted in earlier feelings." Cover drawing by John Burningham
