Physical and fiercely lyric, Helen Humphreys' Anthem is a litany of want. A song of poverty and of desire, of the reach forward and the relentless backward glance. With stark images and subtle, tensile strength, her poems touch that rare interval between presence and absence, echo and answer, between wall and window and sky-that gap in which we live, the space words make.

SHORTLISTED for the 2000 Pat Lowther Award for best book of poetry by a woman published in 1999. WINNER of the 2000 Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry.