Stamped with his signature blend of compassion and conscience - of intimate individuality and the social world in which we confront the implications of our attitudes and beliefsSparrow distills the development of Gibbons' work from the late sixties to the present. These are poems of love, sorrow, keen attentiveness, and a powerful range of emotion and thought.

There is an ethical dimension in Gibbons' poetry; it is rarely explicit, but it lies behind his drama of conflict and choice, his meditations on feeling and place, and his experiments with form. Here also we find the poet's subtle exploration of how our consciousness is shaped - not only by our own unique experience, but also by the limitless possibilities of language itself.