The first new stand-alone collection of poetry in twenty-five years from Vikram Seth, one of the country's greatest living poets.'I have so carefully mapped the corners of my mind That I am forever waking in a lost country'Summer Requiem traces the immutable shifting of the seasons, the relentless rhythms of a great world that both 'gifts and harms'. Luminous, resonant and profound, these poems trace the dying days of summer, 'the hour of rust', when memory is haunted by loss and decay. But in the silence that follows, as the soul is cast adrift, there is also reconciliation with the transience of all things, the knowledge that there is a place, 'changeable, that will not betray'.