Reeling In The Face Of Collapsing Systems, Of Politics, Identity And The Banalities And Distortions Of Modern Living, Nick Laird Confronts Age-old Anxieties, Questions Of Aloneness, Friendship, The Push And Pull Of Daily Life. At The Book's Heart Lies The Title Sequence, A Profound Meditation On A Father's Dying, The Reverberations Of Which Echo Throughout In Poems That Interrogate Inheritance And Legacy, Illness And Justice, Accounts Of What Is Lost And What, If Anything, Can Be Retrieved.laird Is A Poet Capable Of Heading Off In Any And Every Direction, Where Layers Of Association Transport Us From A Clifftop In County Cork To The Library Steps In New York's Washington Square, From A Face-off Between Freud And Michelangelo's Moses To One Between The Poet And A Squirrel In A Kilburn Garden. There Is Conflation And Conflagration, Rage And Fire, Neither Of Which Are Seen As Necessarily Destructive.