The centrepiece of Stewart Conn's new collection is a sequence of poems inspired by Renoir's famous painting The Luncheon of the Boating Party. Complementing thse and other poets set vividly in southern France are evocations of people and places in his native Scotland and elsewhere. Stewart Conn can be wrily self-deprecatory one moment and startlingly moving the next, and in these new poems he manages to combine delicacy of perception with urgency of expression. This collection is now out of print but much of it is reprinted in his 2014 retrospective The Touch of Time.