New terrain is marked in Frieda Hughes’s brilliant new collection, Waxworks. In it, Hughes has conceived and created a kind of poetic wax museum. She peoples it with figures from myth and legend, the Bible and world history, the famous and the infamous.

Diverse personalities, such as Rasputin and Cinderella, Medea and Lazarus, Houdini and Lady Macbeth, have been reborn of their old selves in Waxworks. Hughes imbues them with new life in contemporary terms; they experience the universal truths of love and pain and vanity that affect us all. As this volume proves, Hughes never flinches from difficult subjects and experiences.

Like Wooroloo, Frieda Hughes’s debut collection, the poems of Waxworks will haunt a reader’s imagination.