Each poem in this lively collection affirms the role of the poet as an unrivalled observer of life. Signs are there in the poems of love and the natural world, such as To a Young Girl and Feline. The cyclic progression of history is highlighted in Dunwich, while the poems on dementia and death (Voices, Dead Flowers), prefigure the positive beliefs crystallized in poems such as The Path.
 

Excerpt

The First Man

What made that first man
pick up his stone and send
scratches sprawling
in multiplying efficiency

of purpose over the white bone?
Torn from a carcase,
scrawled on at leisure,
with that action came

hooting and laughing as
his slow brain resided in
the graven image. What
came to him there,

when for the first time
he looked at his art, seeing
only inadequate show
of his own poor frame?

He was fixed in that first wonder,
no longer stooping,
as the pleasurable mind-grow
began in pain.