Mary Cresswell is at her imaginative best in this new collection, built from her experiments with the ghazal, a traditional form, which she first met via the work of Agha Shahid Ali and Mimi Khalvati. The poems in ‘Fish Stories’ are presented as an intellectual challenge to students of the ghazal and glosa forms, encouraging them to develop their own craft. At the same time, Cresswell’s poetry is widely accessible and appealing: using rhyme and varying poetic structures, inspired by a range of topics, but especially by nature and ecology, she combines humour with serious comment to engage and connect with her reader.