Hens can be fun visitors, when they gossip and sunbathe and pop inside for a chat, but they can outstay their welcome and tackling them to send them home isn't easy. They aren't the only creatures in the pages of this book - there's Ursula the golden-eyed cat, a leporine emperor, singing mice and all the swallows! Then there are the people who interact with them: an entomologist in love with the spiders he observes, a builder who releases a trapped mouse, a woman who attracts bees as a flower does - and Mary and the hens, of course.

And there's more to tackle: the steepness of Devon Street, unpicking a cardigan, the loss of a mother. Here are poems that are busy in the world, telling people's stories, crunching words between their teeth. They remind us at every turn that life is many things at once: long and short, difficult and brilliant, sad and joyful - and, like the hens, all we can do is truck on.