Brian Johnstone's writing is rounded in reality; it locates and combines symbolism with biography. The Home Service is a fine poem, illustrating how we cope and do not cope with change and time. The old radio stands for base certainties. Class Photograph evokes old school photographs. Poems of places in Scotland have an intimacy and sense of history. Firth is very well-written, with a beautiful movement, rhetorical, yet of the human voice.

This is an enjoyable collection by an accomplished writer.