Margaret McDaniels, an American, moved to Singapore with her Chinese husband from Penang, David Leong, in 1949. In her 14-year sojourn here, she wrote and published many poems, including a significant number of poems for young readers. Her sharply-observed, lyrical poems address the natural and social world of Singapore-Malaya in the 1950s. The poems collected in The Ice Ball Man and Other Poems are from her previously well-loved published works that have gone out of print.