The first collection of poems in eight years from one of Ireland's most accomplished lyric poets invokes and explores the pastoral imagination in poems about grief, love's remote history, and a more recent past. In poems that, in his words, are written from a "melancholy distance," McDonald finds new shapes that reflect the difficult, contradictory relations of people to place and environment.

Peter McDonald won the Newdigate prize for poetry and an Eric Gregory award. A former instructor at Bristol University and Cambridge University, he is the Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry at Christ Church, Oxford.