Variations on Painting a Room brings together ten years of small press publications by the poet Alan Baker, together with a large body of new and uncollected work. His poetry, as Todd Swift notes, "turns the British lyric subtly, and offers new angles on a how a line may be shaped, or allowed to spin off in another direction."Elizabeth Bishop wrote, "The three qualities I admire in the poetry I like best are: Accuracy, Spontaneity, Mystery." These are the qualities I find in Alan Baker's poems. The precise particulars that create a very real, clear and believable writing, a willingness to take risks, and an awareness that what matters is not to be found in the obvious but in the half glimpsed, half said, half understood" (Lee Harwood)