In a return to poetry after his two novels, August and I'll Go To Bed At Noon, Gerard Woodward continues to explore the theme that has haunted much of his work: how we domesticate the world of raw experience and make it our own. This ranges from the personal - the houses lived in with lovers, the houses outgrown and left behind - to the universal: the witty final poem anticipates the future occupation and history of Mars. Woodward's poems are always careful constructions of their own, but alongside his familiar formal verve, this collection has a new intimacy. Poems about his children, about parenthood, translate his own lived experience. His son's shoes are burnt, distilled and placed on a shelf in a stoppered glass jar, 'so that I have a broken/Path in my mind, of every/Step he's taken up till now'. His daughter translates for her parents the cries of lambs.