Collecting the best of Mairi MacInnes’s previous work - including her breakthrough poem, "I Object, Said the Object" - along with new poems, "The Pebble" reflects years of quandary and conflict at home and abroad as the poet imposes on them the order of poetry. This volume concludes with her essay "Why Poetry," on the clash between obligations and rights through which imagination must make its way. A native of England of Highland Scots descent, one who spent nearly thirty years in the United States, MacInnes looks afresh at what a changing perspective brings. Hers is a poetry of estrangement, loss, madness, reprieve, stalemate, and reconciliation. Calling into question, the bonds between person and place, parent and child, traveler and homeland, MacInnes draws our gaze to the crack in the foundation, the friction within an ordinary exchange, the shifting of ground beneath a familiar landscape, the long step between a museum of art and the slum streets outside.
