A collection of poems describing the curious menagerie of guests who arrive at William Blake's inn.

Three women confront the contradictions between art and life, each destined to play the role of a poet's wife. Catherine Blake, the wife of William Blake, a poet, painter and engraver who struggles for recognition in a society that dismisses him as a madman; Nadezhda Madelstam, wife of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, whose poetry costs him his life under Stalin's terror; and the wife of a fictional contemporary Irish poet, who looks back on her marriage...