Solstice, Poems by Don Maclennan

...one can discern a full imaginative possession of the subject. Such fullness, however, stands in contrast to Maclennan's sheerest simplicity of diction. It is a poetic diction, too, that pays scrupulous attention to the precise placement of lexical items on the line. Maclennan's sparsely indexed ontologies hint at a continuing puzzlement, a puzzlement which beckons towards rich but annihilating conditions of being. His metaphors of living, and of life in a southern African locality, provide the briefest, yet most resonant, intimation of knowledge almost achieved.

- from the 1997 Pringle Prize judges' statement