Her work has been described as darkly British, surreal and elegant. While many of her poems are narrative, she is also a poet of ideas, exploring relationships, female experience, memory and place. Her first collection Powder Tower (Arc, 1995) was shortlisted for the 1995 T.S. Eliot prize and on publication of Fever Tree (Arc, 2004) Mslexia magazine selected her as one of the top 10 new women poets of the decade.