"Swallows" draws on the various metaphorical implications of the House in its exploration of the uncanny presence and absence of self and world in poetry. From poems concerned with the eighteenth-century inquiry into the whereabouts of Horace's "Sabine Villa" - a search determined to locate an actual physical site behind Horace's celebrated verse - to poems in the final section transcribed from the walls of a house, these poems acknowledge the desire for the presence of the physical in the written, while understanding the necessary distance between writing and the world. Throughout the book, swallows act as a kind of genius loci: presences that arrive and depart continually.