Winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year in 1985, these poems were written after the death of Douglas Dunn's first wife in March 1981.

Douglas Dunn was born in Inchinnan, Renfrewshire in 1942, and was Professor in the School of English at the University of St Andrews. As well as over ten collections of poetry - including Elegies (1985), which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, and New Selected Poems 1964-2000 (2003) - he has written several radio and television plays and edited various anthologies, including Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry (2006). He was awarded an OBE in 2003 and the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 2013., Douglas Dunn was born in Inchinnan, Renfrewshire, in 1942 and lived there until he married at the age of twenty-two. After working as a librarian in Scotland and Akron, Ohio, he studied English at Hull University, graduating in 1969. He then worked for eighteen months in the university library after which, in 1971, he became a freelance writer. In 1991 he was appointed Professor in the School of English at the University of St Andrews. As well as ten collections of poetry, including Elegies (1985), The Year's Afternoon, The Donkey's Ears (both 2000), and New Selected Poems 1964-2000 (2003), Douglas Dunn has written several radio and television plays, including Ploughman's Share and Scotsman by Moonlight. He has also edited various anthologies, including Twentieth-Century Scottish Poetry (2006). Douglas Dunn has won a Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and has twice been awarded prizes by the Scottish Arts Council. In 1981 he was awarded the Hawthornden Prize for St Kilda's Parliament. In January 1986 he was overall winner of the 1985 Whitbread Book of the Year Award for his collection Elegies.