Island of Towers is a well travelled, luminous collection of poems, released after 25 years of writing. Aykroyd dazzles with myriad forms and a wordly otherworldliness. She is a poet guided by great lights, ‘Tagore, Césaire, Neruda’, only to ‘never go / as far as Pont Mirabeau’. Aykroyd crosses continents at the beat of a butterfly wing, all the time writing with timeless beauty and grace. Island of Towers, to paraphrase Paul Celan, is “a message in a bottle...sent out in the—not always greatly hopeful—belief that  somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land.”