My second collection Nothing serious, nothing dangerous of 47 poems was published in 2019 by Indigo Dreams Publishing.

‘The strength of Fokkina McDonnell’s airy and enjoyable second collection lies in her command of an idiom sufficiently fluid and flexible for her to explore widely without any sense of strain: and her awareness of the ambiguities of language can accommodate the mildly surreal as easily as the acutely observed and felt. She weaves a pattern of recurring threads – family and other relationships, a feeling for the natural world (a whole aviary, the sea, land creatures, a cornucopia of fruit) and locations from East Anglia and Manchester to Holland and China go alongside a keen appreciation of artists, with paintings triggering a number of the poems. Hers is a voice of light tones, but also measured utterance: gratifyingly, the result is greater than the sum of its parts.‘

(Lawrence Sail, poet – 13 collections, most recently Guises with Bloodaxe.)

The striking cover painting is The Departure by the late artist Graham Kingsley Brown.