There are love poems of lyric grace and stunning simplicity; exuberant paeans to nature in all its beauty, fierceness and cruelty; narratives which grip and characters who are powerfully memorable. Here is a celebration of life which is made all the more intense by the consciousness of mortality which lurks behind every vivid occasion.

Readers who have enjoyed Ian McDonald's recent work in the much praised collections Mercy Ward and Essequibo will be delighted by these earlier poems, only a few of which have been available to date in anthologies and Caribbean literary journals.

'[McDonald's] poems invariably 'leap with colours' - literally and figuratively - making his readers, like the small boys in 'The Seine Pullers', 'smile brilliantly with excitement'.' - Patricia Harkins, The Caribbean Writer.