This book collects the poems of Thomas Kinsella from his five most recent Peppercanister pamphlets. As he has throughout his writing, here Kinsella sets himself, clear-eyed, to face hard truths: 'the waste and the excess' of the living process; ageing and emptiness; the cancer of war. But against these are the creatively redeeming impulses - of the search for understanding: 'an imagination arguing with itself / until the ache is eased'; above all, of 'Grace as desire - Joy of the flesh / Saying all it can of love.'