This selection of thirty-four of McQueen's best-loved poems brings together work from twenty years of performance and publication. Cilla McQueen's readings of her work are unforgettable. In this recording, her readings are accompanied by three Dunedin musicians. Many of the poems on this CD are from a time when Cilla was the partner of leading New Zealand artist Ralph Hotere. Echoes bounce between the works of the two. A must for all poetry and art lovers.

Soundings is another landmark in the development of an important and widely read New Zealand poet. This collection continues and develops the themes of homeland and loss, colonisation and displacement that have been constantly important to McQueen. She writes as a descendant of both the colonized – on far Scottish Islands – and those who colonise – in exploring Richard Greynvile’s handling of the colony at Roanoke in Virginia. Her writing also reflects the history and present reality of the Maori in southern New Zealand.

During her time as New Zealand's Poet Laureate, Cilla McQueen worked on a project that explored a space between prose and poetry. It was published in chapters on the Poet Laureate website, and retitled Edwin’s Egg & Other Poetic Novellas. This work is now published for the first time in hard-copy format, combining McQueen’s evocative text with wonderful images from the collection of the Alexander Turnbull Library.

In this fine collection of new poems and drawings, Cilla McQueen traces the lives and voyages of her ancestors, and the living history of her husband's people. She herself travels through the fire that destroys her house at Otakou, the autoclave of the central poem, tying together the separate threads of her journey and moving from one harbor to another. The sea is a constant element in these poems which she balances along with her precisely observed images of domestic life and her relationship with the forms and inhabitants of the land. Markings, the author's seventh book of poetry is a meditation on family history and midlife -- aspects to which readers can relate.