Marking Seasons is a record of one woman’s life in poetry. Poems dealing with love and loss, poems telling stories of the past, poems where characters reveal their own lives or the poet responds to the natural world – this is a remarkably diverse collection. From tender and elegiac love poems, to fondly nostalgic reminiscences of past days, to the misery of deeply-felt family tensions, to the sharply pointed, witty and even scurrilous retelling of classic fairy tales – there are poems in this collection for every reader.

Drawing on six poetry collections and a range of new and selected poems, some previously published and others appearing for the first time, this book offers poems from two decades of writing. With an observant and sympathetic eye, Valerie Volk brings to life scenes and characters from her world, real and imagined, sharing both the joy and the pain of contemporary life.