Turquoise Patch is a journey through the overwhelming grief following the death of both my son and husband. The collection of poetry was started in the year 2000 and through this poetry I have worked through the grief of losing my darling son, Bevin Julian Martin, followed four years later by the loss of my beloved husband Trevor Stanley Martin. Bevin's ashes are scattered on Holaman Island on the Isle of Raasay in the Western Isles. a spiritual place and some of the poems in the collection were written on the island. Trevor's ashes are scattered on the Isle of Jura at Barn Hill where George Orwell wrote part of Nineteen Eighty Four. Much of the poetry in the collection is inspired by the beauty and power of nature. The metaphysical quality of some of the poems is influenced by the late Sorley Maclean of Raasay. The last six poems in the collection were written by Trevor and Bevin.

Although Isak Dinesen has been widely acclaimed as a popular writer, her work has received little sustained critical attention. In this revisionist study, Susan Hardy Aiken takes up the complex relations of gender, sexuality, and representation in Dinesen's narratives. Drawing on feminist, psychoanalytic, and post-structuralist theories, Aiken shows how the form and meaning of Dinesen's texts are affected by her doubled situations as a Dane who wrote in English, a European who lived for many years in Africa, and a woman who wrote under a male pseudonym within a male-centered literary tradition. In a series of readings that range across Dinesen's career, Aiken demonstrates that Dinesen persistently asserted the inseparability of gender and the engendering of narrative. She argues that Dinesen's texts anticipate in remarkable ways some of the most radical insights of contemporary literary theories, particularly those of French feminist criticism. Aiken also offers a major rereading of Out of Africa that both addresses its distinctiveness as a colonialist text and places it within Dinesen's larger oeuvre. In Aiken's account, Dinesen's work emerges as a compelling inquiry into sexual difference and the ways it informs culture, subjectivity, and the language that is their medium. This important book will at last give Isak Dinesen's work the prominence it deserves in literary studies.