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“... Prayer in the throat of a non-believeroffered up to the absent hereafter,his two long notes and descending warbleput him at the centre of things.A partial method, he knows, is no method;but when you are too weak for beauty’sstartlement, when you desire not silencebut the peace of vague and benignneglect, at decibels audible overthe wind, radio, tyres through gravel,through the open driver’s windowhis song is like arrows of pure mathstraight into whatever the heart is,its still unbroken land, its native grasses ...”

“... Why, after so many years, is she with me now?We who were not close in lifewalk among the caribou lichenwhose coral-like low forms, white against the mossesand wild blueberry in its red phase,seem to give off light.She has escapedthrough the window of the body’s house of harminto the freedom of a truth that will never be recognised.And indeed they do give off light, fungi and algaein a collaboration that obscuresthe individual collaboratorswho’ve taken it entirely off-spectrum,reflecting every wavelength and phosphorescing under the UVintensely where appearing most delicateas though, as has been written, the best metaphor for stillnessis constant motion ...”

“... Endless heritage beneath the heavenly soundshed. Jet-black amphiboles. Ten varieties of scones in Elie. Giant centipedes and petrified tree stumps of the Devonian fossil record. Pyrope garnets at the foot of the Lady’s Tower aren’t quite rare enough to acquire significant market value, much like the self-taught experts in autobrecciation and exfoliation weathering who work their way to the surface of the Coastal Path at the close of a hard winter ...”

“... Returning home from evening massin the big car,they were like canal boats thensliding through the loose gravel, in the back seatshe pushed my cuticles upwith a silver file not unpainfullyto expose the half-moons, she saidGod put them there, he likes to see them.An empty bottle rolled under the passenger seatand back out againas my grandfather droveone foot on the gas, one on the brake,it was a clear glass bottle with white lettering,and a sense of the conditional crept in through the ventslike dust, the incense of the roadscrubbing the air of clarity, of all else but the demands of dustwhat you need replacedwith what you don’t, you are ignoredby everything as you struggle with it ...”

“... Like a king from a promontory the kestrel presides from an updraft, an array of barely perceptible movements sustaining balance and attention, and the woodmouse, the shrew, the secondary characters, know whose watch they’re under. There are no bystanders among them. The razorbill’s piety winters at sea, is secular and medium-sized, black above, white below; while, frontloaded with military technology, gannets send notes of the aquatic scale straight to the emotional signature clusters, though the proprietors of these emotions are to them as senseless an element as the shadow I cast over a vole’s workday, my presence too non-specific for relevance ...”

“... Crail Spring Surprised on returning to find the flat flooded with light. Merciless, evaporative, even when overcast, and, as the solstice neared, sanctimonious in its imperative to productivity. An expert with his pen-light wondering how you let it get this bad. That tone. We were out all day in the clarity of errors that had multiplied into reality ...”

“... Smoking in the yard two weeks before Christmasout of the wind, under Orion,inhaling anger, exhaling sorrow,which is how anger metabolises,the end product always a sorrowof remorse or failure. I would give this angerto Orion, whom I’ve only recently learned to identify,forever on his back foot, his stories gofrom bad to worse, and the benzene riseslike a prayer, arsenic on the breathcold makes visible, that makes visiblethe cold ...”

“... Introducing Karen Solie, I would adapt what Joseph Brodsky said some thirty years ago of the great Les Murray: ‘It would be as myopic to regard Mr Murray as an Australian poet as to call Yeats an Irishman. He is, quite simply, the one by whom the language lives.’ Solie is Canadian (born in 1966, in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, of Norwegian immigrant stock), the author of three previous books of poems, Short Haul Engine (2001), Modern and Normal (2005) and Pigeon (2009), and now this ‘new and selected’, and, yes, she is the one by whom the language lives ...”