You can't enter the past -- it's true -- but there are towlines that steady you alongside. Their unravelling renders tomorrow indistinct. -- from "Shoreland"

Anne Compton's fourth collection, Alongside, tells an unexpected love story, a celebration of beauty which begins in the mind and wanders out into the garden and back again through the library. It is a story that moves between the wild and the domestic. Beauty, like the figure of the fox that appears and re-appears here, is joyous and elusive, glimpsed and gone. Every poem in the book is a conversation, with other writers, with lovers, with books, and an Island past. A conversation about the way in which the unlived life always walks beside us.