The trees descend, image of love,
To drink the brackish water of
Estuary of tidal river,
To lean their inland fulness over
That bright and far-brought mineral other.

E. J. Scovell has made her own terms with poetry. She has published only four book-length collections, her first in 1944, though she started writing in the 1920s. This volume reveals that she has not been as 'scarce' a poet as her admirers have believed. She has been overlooked by anthologists and critics, partly because her work was long out-of-print until the beginning of a revival in 1982, and partly because the path she chose to follow did not cross the busy highways of fashion.

She wrote of her poems: 'I should like the surface to be entirely clear, and the meaning to be entirely implicit; I should like the reader to understand what I say, so that along with it he may apprehend something I do not say, but which the subject of my poem expresses to me, and could to him'.