Kevin Ireland's seventeenth book of poems cocks an amused, satiric, shrewd and always deadly serious eye at life, love and landscape.

There are conversations with the neighbours, thoughts on the weather, birthdays, writers and writing, dreams, milking a cow and the Treaty. Then the book ends abruptly with first reactions to the sudden death of
his wife:

I reach for a pen.
My hand fails. It draws
a wavering line under an emptiness.