Chrys Salt captures the life and the distress of ‘outsider artist’ Angus MacPhee in language and imagery as natural as his materials – grass-roots, hawkweed, husk and seed, moss, buttercup, vetch and thorn – weaving them into an elegiac evocation of the loss and regret he worked through in his long years of incarceration. Her deeply felt and sympathetic take on a life so nearly wasted leaves the man and his creations ‘caught like a burr on cloth / of dim remembering’ bringing him to life in the deepest recesses of our mind’s eye.