Marion McCready's highly anticipated second collection, Madame Ecosse is a very Scottish collection of lyrical poems. Political and personal by turns, these poems explore the natural world, history and myth, and the female experience across the centuries.

Tree Language is told in shard-like poems of supreme richness and finely balanced darkness - variously shaped, whittled to a point, almost sharp enough to draw blood. And although this is a book spiked with brambles and skeletal branches, shot through with frost and fossilled with plant-bones, blood is the slick thread that sews together its themes and landscapes: war and personal tragedy, daffodils and poppies, Jerusalem, Scotland, colour and desolation.