Love and loss, two frequently exhausted themes of poetry, find fresh life under the pen of poet Ian Burgham. Through the poems in this collection, sadness and solitude become lenses for viewing the world's beauty, and love is a territory that humanity maps with little skill. Indeed the very core of humanity is explored in the poems, set against the Canadian literary landscape and frequently returning to distances-those imposed upon oneself by desire or loss-and motifs of conversation. Approachable but affecting, the poems of this collection raise questions, and anwers for them, that the reader did not know they had.