Adrift offers a cross section of Ian Stephen’s nearly three decades’ worth of poetic and dramatic work. His poetry is dynamic and succinct, to the point where I have been tempted to reproduce here, poems in their entireties. His work has its spiritual home in the Hebrides and their surrounding waters. For Stephen, the sea and shore are vibrant, active; landscape is not background, it is interwoven with the author’s own personality. Stephen expresses himself in terms alternately flowing and lyrical, or imagistic and disaffected. He deals as readily with questions of aesthetic as he does with the grimy trivialities of the everyday. The result is, either way, voiced with economy and pathos.
Adrift
