No gardener could ever grow an apple tree that blooms all year round, gifting both the flower arranger and the bee with twenty-four seven blossom. It's an impossible dream, something we desire but can't possess.Only the poet can cultivate such a species. This poet seeds her collection with flowers, birds and insects that hover, uncaught, on the boundaries of reality. Consider this kingfisher, perched by a stream. Look again, and it might never have even existed. Another poem's optical illusion shows you a rabbit - but tilt it sideways and it's a human infant.This is a book balancing concise and truthful lyric poems with longer, showier witty monologues.

Dotted like stepping-stones throughout are a series of personal poems, all written to the length of the poet's single breath. To read them aloud and embody their rhythms is to make them a part of you. These are poems requiring reader involvement to live.Twenty-Four Seven Blossom follows Julia Bird's well-received debut collection Hannah and the Monk, published in 2008. Five years on, we're all more wind-blown and weathered, and though we're beginning to suspect our trees might never flower twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, here's a book to distract and console you while you wait.