From the vantage point of later middle life, Ian McDonald's collection looks into the heart of time passing: the coming death of aging parents, the old men, the sight of 'my own lines of age' and the loss of pleasure in the glittering carnival of the senses. There are joys in the rich blessings of the arrival of a new child coming unexpected at this stage of life, but those joys are made more piquant by the inescapable sense of the ephemeral. Poems of moving domestic intimacy and humor ('To alarm their fathers half to death/New-born babies hold their breath'), valedictory requiems for the characters who have given Georgetown life its flavor and regret for the country's loss of civility during its darkest recent years and songs in praise of nature are all part of a vision which looks into the darkness but says, 'Yes, it is as you say, / But let us get just one thing straight: / There is beauty in the world/ ... And the star-tree blossoms in the night, /Night that will have an end.'