At first glance these poems may seem to be modern romantic writings however, that is not the case, they illustrate the eternal human difficulty of celebrating ‘being’ very much in the way that Gerald Manley Hopkins in his way tried to do so in lines such as ‘Glory be to God for dappled things…’. Azadeh writes about one thing - or several - in terms of other things in the way that poets have always attempted to over-come the limitations of language. Central, is the process of talking to oneself as in ‘Me and I’ even though some poems use the rhetorical device of apostrophe. Stylistics aside, the important thing is that in speaking to herself, Azadeh is speaking to all humanity. Dennis Greig