"In Mortal Memory" is a collection of lyric poems, celebratory if often melancholy, both elegiac and ironic. Affirming that life is 'all becoming' McNeillie mourns what that means in terms of loss and sorrow at time passing. The sea is a powerful presence, its meaning drawn both from the northern landscapes in which McNeillie's work is rooted, and from the work of French poets, from Baudelaire and Hugo to Rimbaud and Corbiere. The poems pitch up and down across formalities, against the idea of purity, while sustaining a rhyming, singing line.