Ian McDonald is South America's equivalent of Robert Frost; a poet writing in a young country who, with an open heart and in clean, honest language, has set down its characters and events, its landscape, traditions and myths, for future generations to discover. Readers far beyond the Caribbean will come to admire his deft use of dialect; his nature poetry, steeped in the mysteries of the Guyanese interior; his sobering awareness of mortality. This selection by Edward Baugh, published for the poet's seventy-fifth birthday, sets the poems from McDonald's four collections in chronological order for the first time. As Baugh writes in his introduction, Ian McDonald's verse is 'irradiated by his celebration of life, his gratitude for happy days and for earth's bounty of joy'.