The poems gathered here were composed by Donald Davie for his wife Doreen, to whom he was married and devoted for fifty years. The earliest of them were copied out by hand and presented to Doreen as a tribute on the occasion of her 54th birthday, and this -garland- was then added to over the years. Of the 43 poems, ten are published here for the first time, two others in new versions. They span the five decades of the couple's marriage, and because of this portray an enduring but complex relationship as it changes over time.

To some readers the poems will seem unusual as love poems because...