Born in the small community of Whithorn in Galloway, Scotland, Alastair Reid (1926-2014) became one of the most international figures in post-war Scottish literature. A staff writer on The New Yorker for many years, he was widely admired as an essayist and as a translator of Latin American writers, including Neruda and Borges. He also spent time in Mallorca working with Robert Graves in the 1950's. This is the first ever collected poems of a man Jay Parini described as "among the finest poets of his generation, it's time his work found the audience it deserves".