Time Seeds is a collection of poems celebrating life, acknowledging loss and asserting the moral imperative of hope and renewal. Already acclaimed for her eloquently written works of historical fiction, Margaret Elphinstone has now applied her skills to a collection of writing which has adopted the brevity and immediacy of poetry to articulate the urgency and perils of our times. Each turn of the page brings its own surprise, whether a deeply personal or globally challenging idea. This is no predictable poetry collection. Nor, despite the passionately expressed fears for all living beings, is it a missal of doom. A belief in renewal, she argues, is essential, though the form it will take is as yet unknown and may surprise us. Doing nothing is not an option. Failure to hope would be a terrible betrayal of future generations, not just of humanity but of all life. These wholly approachable poems share moments from a life richly observed. Here are poems of time and memory, experience, and gratitude for the beauty of the world. They are bright, full of colour and unpretentious, shaped by Margaret Elphinstone’s characteristic wisdom and warmth. – Kathleen Jamie