With The Company of Swans, Jim Crumley has ensured that there will be a more enduring monument to the life of this swan, and of all swans, than the pile of white feathers. Crumley watches, year in and year out, as a pair of mute swans struggle, against the odds, to raise their young on a wild patch of loch. But the pen starts to lose her eggs to predators and the cob begins to disappear for longer and longer periods. One day a third swan, younger and stronger than the first pen, appears at the other end of the loch.

This beautiful record, on fine paper, is Crumley's homage to these noble creatures, but it is also an elegy, a love song to one swan whose silent tragedy he watched from one season to the next.