Following The Guidman’s Daughter with his poems on Mary, Queen of Scots, Marsh begins this new collection with a sequence exploring the life and times of John Knox, locating this ambivalent figure in the turmoil of the Scottish Reformation. Marsh moves via Kepler and Darwin into a celebration of nature, searching within our secular world to ‘find a language’ to render its mystery and concludes by touching on the great challenges we now face. Our striving to understand the nature of things hints, perhaps, at the possibility of a different kind of redemption.

'Henry Marsh is one of the finest poets writing in Scotland today. His delicate, beautifully expressed verse has already achieved critical and popular acclaim. Whatever the topic of the poem the voice is consistently wise, and gentle too; the effect is both subtle and moving.' Alexander McCall Smith

Henry Marsh was born in Broughty Ferry and now lives in Midlothian. He began writing on the death of a friend, a Gaelic Bard, Donald MacDonald of South Lochboisdale. His first collection of poems, A First Sighting, was published in 2,005. Seven other collections have followed, A Turbulent Wake (2007),  A Trail of Dreaming (2009), The Hammer and the Fire (2011), Wayfarers (2011), Painted Trees (2012),  A Voyage to Babylon (2013), and The Bedrock, poems on themes from the Great Tapestry of Scotland (2015).