In Mortal Memory

Joyful, elegiac, and immediate, these lyric and often celebratory poems engage personal and natural history, nation-states and mental states, violence, religion, and poetry itself. An ecologically focused collection, each poem affirms life as all-becoming, dwelling on metaphors such as mountains and valleys, the changing seasons, and the vastness of the sea. Divided into two parts, Song in Winter,' a collection of unrepentantly self-indulgent verse, and At Sea,' containing extended tributes to George Campbell, W. S. Graham, J. M. Synge, and others, these astonishing poems, taken as a whole, work against formalities while maintaining a fluid rhyming structure.