In Douglas Reid Skinner's eighth book of poems, a lifetime of writing becomes the writing of a lifetime. With verse ranging from the philosophical to the surreal, Skinner ponders the most universal of questions and concerns - how to live, and, perhaps more crucially, how to die.

Through landscapes of ploughed fields, dream highways, and building sites alike, our human concepts of memory and literature are observed, retraced, or even deconstructed. Behind the easy intelligence and humour, Skinner remains a flagbearer for the traditions of South African poetry in English.

Poems are written for writers and loved ones who have passed, others for those who have most of their years to come - all held in expert balance by a master of his art.

This seventh collection from one of South African poetry's under-appreciated masters is possibly his best yet. Metatextual, meticulous and deeply steeped in sentiment, Liminal is an exquisite and at-times startling rumination on lives lived, loves loved and writings written. Skinner's technical mastery of his style and craft, honed over the decades, only brightens the emotions that run through a mélange of travel poems, remembrances, experiments and treatises on the nature of being, literature and friendship.

Blue Rivers is Douglas Reid Skinner’s fifth collection. The poems cover a wide range of subjects, from love, childhood and the death of parents to fellow writers, catastrophe and the nature of memory, illness, time, loneliness, language, thought and meaning. At the same time, they explore the process of writing itself, viewed from different angles and seen through a range of prisms; each poem is both what it is about and also a thesis on what poetry is, how it means, and how poetry talks back into the writer.