All in all, [Macphee's] poetry is a search for 'the rightness of things'. But not without entertaining a deep sense of the fragilities, the instabilities that sensitise ordinary daily lives.

Macphee is surely a poet to watch. Tails... contains fine poems, the reading of which offers the excitement of poetry often working with genuine precision and poems coming to properly clinching endings.

While her poems do reflect her scientific background from time to time, they also tell a very human story... Her work combines technical excellence with accessibility.

There is a lovely mix in your poems in Tails between the lyrical/poetic and occasionally difficult use of language and the deeply personal... how do you bridge that formal/personal divide?

I suppose I don't see it as a divide. In fact, the more emotive or personal a subject is, the more likely I am to use a tightly-controlled traditional or nonce form: paradoxically it's the constraints of the form that make it possible to get started on a difficult theme.

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