Rare Earths

Rare Earths marks the poetry debut of prize-winning novelist Deena Linett. In narrative and lyric poems, the collection displays the range of the poet’s art as she considers time and love, the movement of mind and—ultimately—loss. Book I of Rare Earths is an intriguing and suspenseful story in verse. Mairi MacIntyre, a young architect, travels to the desolate North Atlantic island of St. Kilda, 110 miles off the coast of Scotland. In journal excerpts and letters to her husband and mother—discovered after Mairi’s death—she comes to terms with her own longings and inner life and her ties to the women who once inhabited the island. Complementing Book I—and adding to the many mysteries in Rare Earths—are the lyric poems in Book II by “the American,” an anonymous poet who was present on the dig with Mairi McIntyre. Eventually They Come Ashore the living and the dead whether you wait for them or not. There are so many more of the dead, and the living drown on stony