The Brevity of Red is the product of long reflection on loss: of a daughter, a sister, parents; and of familial stories. These intelligent, vivid, carefully crafted poems honour the dead, yet they avoid easy answers. Although they affirm the power of love and are centred in the personal, their tendency is centrifugal.

Dramatic monologues in the voices of Hannah, Isaac, Job or a Mohenjo-daro carver of seals are reinforced by meditations on ancient artefacts that connect us to a vanishing past whose human pain, savagery, whimsy and redemption illuminate our present day ironies and "joys / with the soil still on them."

With fresh metaphors and emotionally resonant images, MacLean questions those places where we seek solace: our artistic imaginations, our religious traditions and myths, as well as the entrancing, but arbitrarily cruel natural world from which we spring. Always she calls us to attention within this moment. Her language is focused, her descriptions clear and precise. Though the mood is largely elegiac, it is also wry and surprisingly edgy, as it reaches for the grace notes of celebration.