Her first two collections, Night Photograph (1993) and A World Where News Travelled Slowly (1997), exhibited a cool intelligence, an ability to take an idea for a walk and a confident use of scientific and historical material. They were, at the same time, books that contained much that was powerfully intimate and captivatingly mysterious. True, Greenlaw had that fondness for quizzical associations and anecdotal riddles that typifies her generation of poets at Faber. But her books evinced far too much distinctive talent for it to be possible to dismiss Greenlaw as just another Paul Muldoon wannabe.