In a letter to his brothers in 1818, John Keats remarked on a curious expression in vogue among his friends: "they call drinking deep dying scarlet." The poems in this collection, inspired by Keats' misspelling of "dyeing," explore the ways in which we drink deep from life, searching for beauty and passion despite a melancholy awareness of our own mortality.

Poised between praise and lamentation, Dying Scarlet moves from the experiences of the poet's grandfather in the trenches of World War One, to the fate of an obscure English poet in the Elizabethan age, to the present-day journey of a sockeye salmon; from the Russia of Anna Akhmatova to the Manitoba of Margaret Laurence. Autumnal and contemplative, these are poems of love, of memory, of home, of dying - and, most profoundly, of life.