This volume collects the best work from Jean Earle’s previous books, A Trial of Strength, The Intent Look and Visiting Light, whilst adding to it over forty outstanding new poems.

Since her first book in 1980 (published at the age of seventy one) Jean Earle has established a considerable reputation as both reader and writer. Her poems are lyrical and visionary, discreetly informed by her faith, widening from the everyday to the universal.

Contemplative and questioning, she explores the distances and spaces which separate past and present, man and nature, seeing and understanding. Observant of the familiar, the poet’s focussed and individual language proves vivid and painterly, the poems marked by revealing images and an almost epiphanic quality. Jean Earle offers a positive response to the modern world: readers of this book will be refreshed by the sheer sanity of her writing.