This beautiful volume of winter and Christmas-themed verses will be a hugely welcome addition to the George Mackay Brown canon. The poet and novelist lived and worked all his life in Stromness on Orkney: the islands being the sole inspiration for the huge and immensely rich body of work that he left behind at his death in 1997. Many of Mackay Brown''s poems are set in the winter months and we have made here a selection of some of the most evocative. Seamus Heaney wrote of him: ''George Mackay Brown has added uniquely and steadfastly to the riches of poetry in English: his sense of the world and his way with words are powerfully at one with each other. The book has Orcadian woodcuts by the artist Kath Littler, including a cover illustration ''Hoy Hare''.