As a poem attuned to form, embodiment, sensory experience and memory, van Neerven’s “Finger Limes” presents an intricate meditation on poetic sustenance and survival. Its riddling currents exemplify how poetry is not sustained along a linear axis but unfolds in eddies and counter currents.

They had been tangled together like kelp from the age of fourteen: sunburned, electric Meg and her sidekick Ruth the dreamer, up to all manner of sinister things. So said their parents; so their teachers reported when the two girls were found down at the estuary during a school excursion, whispering to something scaly wriggling in the reeds.