These poems are the work of time and the cycles of growth, they are songs about saints and scholars, the natural world, exaltation and suffering and ordinary joy. There are narratives of the wondrous bewilderments of life, as well as homages to the dead and the dying, and to their courageous desperate attempts to reach beyond the veil of the ‘now’ to an understanding of ‘how the subtle relationships that had once seemed so open and simple/wove themselves in and out of their dreams’. These poems are the quiet accumulation of the slowly learned lessons of a lived life, a life which has reached its October – ‘October lined with gold’.