"Fossil Unicorn" is Sally Purcell's first collection for more than ten years and contains the very best of her work from that period. Drawing on folklore and medieval sources, these poems are tense yet fluid in rhythm and diction, and alive with a sense of the numinous underlying the world of the senses. Critics of her first collection, "The Holly Queen", spoke of 'the ghostly music' and 'diamantine elegance' of her poetry. These qualities have remained constant in her later work, in which she continues to explore the mysteries of the quest through legend and myth.