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In Ireland’s latest collection of poems, thoughts and emotions are expressed by location. Leaves both falling and underfoot on a path in the woods place the narrator between life and death. A green and brown leaf located side by side characterize the tired narrator and his old but spry mother walking next to one another. The woods are described by the perspicacious narrator as a metropolis that is bustling and, at times, overwhelming.
The natural setting in which most of the poems take place is the narrator’s home—a constant, a haven and solace from the rest of the world, though development and other destructive elements threaten it. Some of the poems lament loss—a son gone to war, a disused lighthouse, the quiet that cars invade—while others exclaim “but.” For example, “Kudzu” is invasive but beautiful. In “After Rain,” the poet criticizes, but roses soften his heart. “Burning Bush” describes a seemingly dead bush but one reborn from pruning. The poems’ nonchronological sequence suggests that the life described does not go in one direction but toggles between sad and glad, humorous and serious, resulting in a meandering and reflective pace.
In saying little, each poem’s brevity (at most a page long) leaves room for a lot of inquiry. “Cinematographers” asks, “don’t the landscapes that they film deserve at least an honorable mention?” The rhyming poems are the most nostalgic, and the final poems, about endings, are somber and also curious. In the last poem, the narrator knows the answer to the question he put to his mother as a boy: “Are we to settle there?” (at Grave-House), but he doesn’t state it, reiterating the poems’ success at inspiring readers to follow their own wonderings.