These poems evade labelling. Under a simple surface, Kilpi's poems display a multi-voiced modernism, ranging from bawdy humour, sexual comedy, daily irritations, and the absurdities of old age, as well as delicate expressions of love and loss.
The carnival of voices extends from poem to poem, and reading them becomes more like listening to jazz, where what matters is the way the instrumentalist takes up and varies the riffs to hand.
In her own words she is 'sometimes a verb, sometimes a noun' and sometimes goes off to 'scare the birds in the fields'. Kilpi is indeed a shape-shifter, and reading her poems thus becomes a voyage into different ways of being.

Eeva Kilpi is one of Finland's best-loved writers, and a Nobel Prize nominee. Her work has been published in sixteen languages, but this is her first full-length poetry collection in English.