The central theme of Carole Satyamurti's collection is the shifting relationship between loss and gain. It explores the varied ways in which that relationship is played out in day-to-day experience. Carole Satyamurti is a poet and sociologist, who lives and works in London. She co-edited Acquainted with the Night: psychoanalysis and the poetic imagination (2003). She won the National Poetry Competition in 1986, and a Cholmondeley Award in 2000. Countdown (2011) is her first new collection since Stitching the Dark: New & Selected Poems (2005), which drew on five collections: Broken Moon (1987), Changing the Subject (1990), Striking Distance (1994), Love and Variations (2000), and Stitching the Dark (2005), two of these Poetry Book Society Recommendations.