A sparkling new collection from Romalyn Ante, nurse and prizewinning poet, moving between the Philippines and Wolverhampton, myth and the grind of the present-day NHS.

‘this charms the buried light of stars –
this deflects bullets – this unblooms a war – ‘

In some Filipino clans, parents pass down to each child an AGIMAT, an amulet, in the hope its magic will protect and empower them. At the dawn of the pandemic, the poet – a practising nurse in the NHS – is thrown onto the frontlines of the war against COVID-19.

Past conflicts swim into the now. When she falls in love with a man of Japanese heritage, it forces a reckoning with her family’s suffering under Japan’s brutal wartime occupation of the Philippines. Elsewhere, we meet the irrepressible goddess Mebuyan, who, in Philippine myth, nurses the spirits of children in the underworld. Here, she watches over young people in crisis – a girl who can’t stop cutting herself, a teenager who has leapt from a railway viaduct.

These are poems of strength and solace; they question what it means to fight, and what it takes to heal.