The poems in this collection vary in subject - World War II, browsing library stacks, a family reunion, sky diving, a visit to a museum and cancer, among other topics - and are arranged to suggest a gradual acceptance of the unavoidable vicissitudes, frictions and griefs of human life.
He imagined a room in a spare hotel, with a balcony giving onto a street lined every day with flowers for Easter. The woman who kept them fresh arrived before dawn, her body an inference he drew from motion under the thick array of lilies, pentstemons, and bee-balm she carried.
