Helen Adam was born in Scotland but spent much of her life in America, as a writer and visual artist. Her poems were included in Donald Allen's influential anthology The New American Poetry  (1960), but she disappeared from view and was rediscovered by readers through Edwin Morgan's 1999 essay, 'Scotland and the World'. The poet Charles Bernstein has said: 'Her magical, macabre, magnificently chilling ballads open a secret door into the Dark.'