Jane Duran was born in Cuba to a Spanish father and American mother, and brought up in the United States and in Chile. This long journey, passing through the Panama Canal and down the Pacific coast of Latin America, has inspired her collection of poems Graceline. These meditative poems cross over continually between illusion and reality, past and present. But the poems are also about her life as a young girl in Chile, the impact of the Chilean landscape on her-and they convey a powerful feeling of love for that country. Although the poems evoke the journey, and the extraordinary landscapes of Chile, they also explore darker undercurrents.