The Touch of Time is a comprehensive retrospective of the work of one of Scotland's leading poets drawing on ten previous books published over five decades. The new work here pursues the themes of his earlier Bloodaxe collections Stolen Light: Selected Poems (1999), Ghosts at Cockcrow (2005) and The Breakfast Room (2010). With what Professor Carla Stassi sees as 'his thoughtful attention to small details, his redeeming gaze, his formal control of impeccably constructed verses, and his deep and warm humanity', he movingly explores everyday events and revelations and how - like our lives and those of our loved ones - they are transformed by time.

'Stewart Conn is one of Scotland's most skilled and wide-ranging poets. A sympathetic, if quite unsentimental, treatment of the natural world, or the rural one at least, does run throughout his poetry, but so do the themes of love, family relationships, the nature and power of art, and that time-honoured subject of poetry - the fragility and transitoriness of life itself' - David McCordick, Scottish Literature in the Twentieth Century. 'Ghosts at Cockcrow is a graceful "slipping" as he puts it, into seniority, at once a coming of old age, and an acquiring of senior status among Scotland's poets. It is full of high culture, old Europe and wry self-deprecation, visiting Barcelona, Burgundy and the capital to which he played laureate for three years, Edinburgh' - W.N. Herbert, Poetry London. 'Characteristically restrained, subtly lyrical and filled with gentle humour, The Breakfast Room is a beautiful and moving collection' - Anne Donovan, Sunday Herald. 'He stands among the indispensable poets of modern and contemporary Scotland' - Douglas Dunn, The Dark Horse.

Stewart Conn was born in Glasgow in 1936 and grew up in Ayrshire, the setting for much of his early poetry. Since 1977 he has lived in Edinburgh, where until 1992 he was based as BBC Scotland's head of radio drama. He was Edinburgh's first Makar or Poet Laureate in 2002-05. His poetry books include Stolen Light: Selected Poems (1999), Ghosts at Cockcrow (2005), The Breakfast Room (2010) and The Touch of Time: New & Selected Poems (2014) from Bloodaxe. His other publications include a memoir, Distances (Scottish Cultural Press, 2001), and two anthologies, 100 Favourite Scottish Poems (SPL/Luath Press, 2006), a TLS Christmas choice, and 100 Favourite Scottish Love Poems (Luath Press, 2008). He has won three Scottish Arts Council book awards, travel awards from the Society of Authors and the English-Speaking Union, and the Institute of Contemporary Scotland's first Iain Crichton Smith award for services to literature. An Ear to the Ground was a Poetry Book Society Choice, Stolen Light was shortlisted for Saltire Scottish Book of the Year, and The Breakfast Room won the Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust Book Awards Poetry Book of the Year Prize.