Andrew McNeillie’s sixth collection returns to the sea and its immensity as a metaphor for fate. It also revisits the British and Irish archipelago (‘For which read a figure for my heart. / For which too read a figure for time’s hurt’), following a north-western trajectory from the Aran Islands to the Hebrides. The natural world is seen here in both its beauty and its indifference to human beings (‘There’s many a thing more lasting than a person’). From a version of ‘The Seafarer’ to an elegiac play ‘for sounds and voices’ retelling the story of an English airman drowned off Aran in World War II, these poems speak of lives and deaths across the reaches of history.