She left the city to study at St Anne's College, Oxford, where she took a degree in English.
Her determinedly neo-romantic poetry explores sacred myth, legend, history-in-landscape, and human feeling—and their connections to the 'inner landscapes' of the imaginative mind.
The compact vividness of her visual imagery is akin to that of the Anglo Saxon riddles, Symbolist poetry, or the work of García Lorca.
Her later volumes, Sighting the Slave Ship (1992) and The Ice-Pilot Speaks (1994) led up to her nomination and shortlisting in the Whitbread Poetry Award for her fourth collection The Wound-Dresser's Dream (1996).
Her most recent works are Sleeping Under the Juniper Tree (2017) and The Silence of Sound Mirrors (2021), the latter included illustrations by Rosamund Ulph.