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.