"Ends and Beginnings" is Iain Crichton Smith's most ambitious collection for years. It begins in elegy, with the exiles and deaths about which he writes so memorably, and progresses through place, history and positive change. After a trip to the Golan Heights, he conceived a major poem on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, using an unaccustomed Biblical idiom. He considers the isolated people of his native Lewis, and those isolated in a wider culture-scholars, writers, lovers, the old-whose need for communion is thwarted by estranging disciplines or by the depredations of history.