In 1979 Medbh McGuckian won England's National Poetry Competition. Three years later she published her first collection, The Flower Master.

In The Sunday Times Christopher Reid welcomed it as 'highly accomplished . . . something strikingly new . . . Her work moves with great dignity and assurance, while her characteristic first-person speaking voice, imitating no other writer's, beguiles one immediately'.

This radically revised edition incorporates additional bewitching, sensuous poems and makes available again persuasive evidence of an original and gorgeous body of work.