Erato takes its title from the muse of lyric poetry. At the centre is an interrogation of the lyric as a vehicle to write the world, both the beauty and the horror. Drawing on documentary-style narratives of her life, combined with lyric reinventions, Rees-Jones asks questions about past, present and future, about the slippages of memory, all our errors and erasures, and the places we inhabit when processing trauma. It is a book full of flames and scars, landscape and animals, and at its heart the transformative music that runs beneath words, and the bodies we inhabit when we love.