RESULTS

Selima Hill's Bunny is set in the haunted house of adolescence. Always blackly comic, sometimes beguilingly erotic, each echoing poem opens a door on madness or menace, shame or blame. Bunny tells the intimate story of a young girl growing up in London in the 1950s, confused and betrayed but finding herself, becoming independent.

Selima Hill's latest collection, The Hat, is a disturbing portrayal of a woman's struggle to regain her identity. Her story emerges through a series of short poems, often related to animals: how she is preyed upon and betrayed, misunderstood, compromised and not allowed to be herself.

Violet is full of double trouble: startlingly wild, often bizarre poems on sisters and husbands, sex, ducks and fridges. If Selima Hill seems to show as strange a portrait of family life as anything by Buñuel or Almodovar, that is because her mirror reflects more than just surfaces. Hers is a looking-glass world seen through a fairground mirror, which exaggerates and accuses as well as telling a few home truths. Both distorting and revealing, Violet explodes lies and tells them too; exposes myths and creates them. In the end, nothing is certain, except that there are giant cows paddling in the stream, sloths singing in the trees, ants herding ferocious sheep, and ailing fish in the fish hospital.