Valerie Gillies has been called one of the outstanding poets of her generation. In this vibrant collection, she takes the reader on a journey across Scotland, exploring the inhabited landscape and the wild places. Locality presides as a powerful motif in a rich world of animals, birds, trees and legendary beings such as the banshee and the Stone Woman of Craigencallie. And Gillies's verse, sustained by its precision of language and its depth of resonance, flourishes in an exuberance of poetic forms, from lyric to ballad, and from sonnet to haiku.