The poems in this collection represent years of work, not in terms of sustained effort but of time span between when it began and late 2012. A productive period in the early years, notable for its monastic focus, was interrupted by a hiatus of living - marriage, career, parenthood - that was followed by a more recent phase spent reexamining the past and staring down the present. This long interval afforded me the time to develop thematic lines that loosely define the book's four sections. It also gave me the freedom to experiment with form. Free and structured verse forms appear in each section.

The poems in Section I contemplate memory and its kin - nostalgia, regret, wistfulness. Those in Section II present various stages and angles of love, including beginnings and endings, wanings and creations. Poems about death past, present and future make up Section III. The main themes in the first three sections seem to coalesce in one character, the grandmothers that feature or cameo in a number of them. Section IV is a series of contemplations sparked by personal experience, philosophy, and insights gained through travel. There is some miscellany in here, too.

Memory is the strongest thematic vein in the collection. It is central in Section I and runs under the surface of many of the poems in the remainder of the book. There is the covert struggle to reconcile the truth of the present with the fiction of the past. There is the warping of perspective that results from only seeing the present through the past. Perhaps Miguel de Unamuno best explains my persistence with these themes in his observation that "the mind seeks what is dead, for what is living escapes it."

Above all, the collection represents a contemplation of the self and how it is formed by memory, love, and death while language strives mightily to report on all of it.