Murmuration: Marianne's Book

and it was in these bare sands / that you fell, / beloved.

When John Baglow's partner Marianne MacKinnon died in 2006, he decided to assemble a new collection of poems in her memory. No one else knew of what proved to be a slow-moving ambition, but a member of the family mentioned one evening that Marianne had appeared in a dream, saying, “Tell John to finish my book.” After that, what choice did he have?

In a famous photograph by James Crombie, a murmuration of starlings takes, for a magical...