James Harpur's fourth collection includes intimate responses to love, birth and death, and explores faith and vision in searching and unsentimental terms. His powerful poetry gives a new perspective on the travels and travails of early Irish saints and on the Syrian pillar hermit St Symeon Stylites. In these and other poems - about the "Book of Kells", a monk and his 'star-timetable', and translations from Boethius - Harpur's lyric gift finds moments of illumination and grace in the ordinary as well as the miraculous.