"Lachlan Mackinnon's fourth collection opens with a gathering of lyrics and descriptive poems: rites of passage (elegies, wedding poems), nuanced accounts of places and their patchwork afterlives (the Midlands, a Suffolk sketchbook), meditations on historical figures introspectively at odds with their time (King Canute, Edward Thomas). This preoccupation with contingency - personal and historical - opens onto The Book of Emma: a long poem of fifty-four sections, written mostly in prose, which addresses a lost friend and contemporary in terms which seem laconically factual, but which also recall archaic conventions of talking to the dead." --Book Jacket.