Lake Sagaris is more attracted to watery places than dry ones. In the desert, she initially sees a barren and lifeless landscape – but she soon recognizes that life there takes unaccustomed forms.

In Bone and Dream (her second non-fiction book about Chile, where she has lived since leaving Canada 20 years ago), Sagaris brings the Atacama desert into sharp focus through her own very personal observations, and the opinions of the desert’s residents. The many who have walked this way before her – geographers, anthropologists, priests, conquistadors, Charles Darwin – seem to use her as a spirit medium, whispering insistently as Sagaris prowls an oasis or Atacamenian fort (ante-Spanish architecture of the Incas and other civilizations the Incas conquered and absorbed). Her fascination and conviction are contagious as she tells stories of mining history and mummification, deforestation and the disappeared, Inca agricultural technology and a syncretic festival of worship dances – the lives and deaths of the desert.

It’s not surprising that Sagaris has produced three acclaimed books of poetry. She has a poet’s wit (as when she drily remarks that we are “a naked, clawless species, our only defense an intelligence we rarely put to good use”), descriptive economy, and love of a good metaphor (volcanoes are “mad farmers … sowing the desert with gold, silver, nitrates, copper”).

There is just one story that neither her poetic eye nor her journalistic one can see quite clearly enough. It’s the semi-apocryphal tale, apparently culled from several sources, of Huillac Ñusta, daughter of an Incan pope, taken hostage by Spanish invaders in 1535. Sagaris seems neither to have enough information nor to give herself sufficient imaginative licence to relate the story with her customary drive and detail. It becomes romanticized and oddly repetitive. In contrast, her devastating narration from the site of a Pinochet-era death camp, or her account of the “copper man,” a 1,400-year-old miner discovered, perfectly preserved and tinted green, in a rich copper mine, show enormous skill with bringing vanished people back to life.