This thesis, titled ‘Hide: A 21st century woman’s response to the first person in poetry’ is a creative and critical examination of the challenges and benefits of the first-person approach in poetry. It is in two parts, consisting of a collection of sixty poems and a critical investigation into the research leading to, and engendered by, the poems. Hide is a place from which to observe, hide is skin, hide is deliberate concealment; all of these meanings can be seen to reflect some of the concerns examined in both the creative and critical parts of the thesis. ‘Hide’s’ layers of meaning directly engage with what 'I' we choose to conceal and what 'I' we choose to show, as well as residing on the boundaries between privacy and exposure. The poems spring from investigations of my central concerns of autobiography, family history, the workings of memory, and ancestral knowledge in the form of ‘cunning’. The poems are an active investigation into the challenges and benefits of the ‘I’; the approaches and techniques for using it as well as the reasons for, and strategies involved in, avoiding the ‘I’. The critical part of the thesis is an auto-ethnographic study of the poems in the collection, together with examination of the difficulties faced by women writing in the first-person. The research includes thematic analysis of published reviews, and examination of the critical landscape within which women are writing.