Illusions and delusions, joys and jokes, mysteries of memory and temporal paradox figure in Andrew McNeillie's collection. Here are sequences of bird poems, and tree poems, lines from an autobiography, lines from America, and poems about old age, in elegiac, ironic, and even vitriolic mode.

Andrew McNeillie's sixth collection returns to the sea and its immensity as a metaphor for fate. It also revisits the British and Irish archipelago ('For which read a figure for my heart. / For which read too a figure for time's hurt'), following a north-western trajectory from the Aran Islands to the Hebrides. The natural world is seen here in both its beauty and its indifference to human beings ('There's many a thing more lasting than a person'). From a version of 'The Seafarer' to an elegiac play 'for sounds and voices' retelling the story of an English airman drowned off Aran in World War...