This prize-winning first collection introduced one of the most powerful and original new voices to come out of Scotland. In language both dense and resonant, grave and lyrical, these poems are concerned, in the end, with the fugitive nature of things: the implacable coupling of desire and sadness, beauty and loss. 'A superb debut . . . darkly chiselled poems haunted by mortality and the fragility of life's pleasures' Kazuo Ishiguro, Sunday Times, Books of the Year