Poems dealing with death, disease, oblivion and oppression are seldom as poised as those encountered here. McGuinness projects the jarring absurdity of unnatural death through an intricate style buzzing with atonalities, asymmetries, partial repetitions and distorted echoes. Less sombre poems are eclectic in their subject matter. Erik Satie's surrealist prattlings, or the problems of Martian drought, offer vehicles for a playful mode of writing, as does a sequence of poems about Belgium.