No Ruined Stone (Peepal Tree), a collection of poems by Jamaica-born Shara McCallum (a past winner of the OCM Bocas Prize for poetry), contemplates an alternate history. In 1786, the poet Robert Burns — one of Scotland’s major cultural icons — accepted an offer to travel to Jamaica to work as a bookkeeper on a slave plantation, then changed his mind. McCallum imagines what could have happened had the plan proceeded. These monologues, rooted in actual history and the poet’s searching imagination, describe the experiences not only of Burns, but of his mixed-race granddaughter born into slavery, who later travels to Scotland and passes as white to claim a new life.