Frame (1924-2004) was one of New Zealand's foremost modern writers, best-known for her prizewinning novels and for the three-volume autobiography later adapted by Jane Campion into her film An Angel at My Table. These poems illustrate the shape of the poet's life: her childhood and later years in mental hospitals blighted by misdiagnosis of schizophrenia; her travels around the world; her life as a writer and return to New Zealand; growing older and facing illness and death. There are love poems, meditations on mortality, flashes of humor and startling imagery. And always she celebrates the power of the human imagination.