In The woman who couldn’t finish things Sue MacIntyre shows us a world inhabited by people living real lives. The relationships in this collection of poems are framed by familiar experiences re-imagined through memory and dreamscape; things are lost, searched for, found, given away (art and literature, moments of pleasure and grief, a stone that might become a poem, pigeons missing from London streets, the elusiveness of sleep). In the foreground is elegy, in the background the ephemera of life, and bookending this collection the two eponymous poems cast varying colour and light on the fragmentary nature of life and what completeness, finishing, might really mean.