Darling: New and Selected Poems include more than a dozen poems, each of which tell different stories about different characters.
"My Grandmother," tells the story of the author's grandmother. The author compares her grandmother to a "Scottish pine" and describes her physical features in vivid detail. Her grandmother's greying hair tied up in a loose bun. Her face being like "ploughed land." The clothes she wears and the way she speaks (with Gaelic accent).
"The Adoption Papers" tells the story of three people who are deeply tied together: daughter, adoptive mother, and birth mother. It is presented as a dialogue between those three characters as they discuss daughter's life, her birth, and her upbringing. They discuss birth mother's fears related to giving birth and her fears related to giving up her child for adoption, which was very taboo in the early 1960s. The poem also discusses daughter's feelings surrounding her birth and subsequent adoption. It also finally discusses the love that adoptive mother has for daughter.
