Fires of Driftwood

A fire is fed with wreckage: salt-bitten driftwood, “flotsam of those glories that were ships.” Yet as the wood catches, its blue flame seems to release a soul from the ruin.

In Isabel Ecclestone Mackay’s poems, the shore, a moonlit garden and the road from Babylon become places where memory will not lie quiet. Published in the 1920s, this collection follows a restless voice through love and longing, grief and renewal: a child’s thoughts sail after the fishers at dawn; a woman pleads to be freed from her jewels; Spring is asked to mend a sore heart. Even Death speaks with unsettling tenderness, offering gifts no one quite knows how to accept. What can flame, time or the heart bring back from what is lost—and what must remain ash?

With centuries of literature, it's inevitable that some will fall through the cracks. We hunt down public domain works and restore them so they're not lost to the world.

Who are we? We're Cairn Press. Our background is in design, publishing, typography, and technology. These skills fuel our mission to create the highest quality Public Domain eBooks available online, at an affordable price. We give them the treatment they deserve; our proprietary process restores books for a better overall user experience in design, readability, and e-reader compatibility.