Metamorphic rather than anthropomorphic, these poems depict the 'creatureliness' of all existance:how distinctions between the non-human and human worlds dissolve as you look at them...
Three long poems - contemplating `The Uses of Greek', imagining the poet Sappho living out her life on the island of Inishbofin, and celebrating `The Farness of Latin' - mark transitions between thematic clusters of shorter pieces.
A Greek merchant-explorer Pytheas - whose home port was the Greek colony of Massalia (Marseilles) - is said to be the first person to have circumnavigated the British Isles, in 325 BCE, thereby fixing the islands in the historical imagination as ...
"As I stand at my kitchen sink and look across at what we optimistically call our herb garden, to one side I see an old wooden sign on which are carved the words 'Arthur's Garden'...