The poems in Plain Text link a London world of past and present, perceived through social and historical myth, with the timeless ancient world of the Greek historian Herodotus. From these worlds emerge exemplary figures, who may be living in the house next door, or in worlds of imaginative representation, in books, pictures or documents. The poems feel their way into the environments of present and past, personal and public. The purpose may be to make things ‘plain’, but plainness turns out to be complex, haunting the everyday with histories forgotten or ignored.