Featuring poems about settling, building, and planting in a country where the poet is a stranger, this collection's varied forms—lyric, ode, sonnet, eclogue, elegy, epithalamium—point to a new engagement with British tradition. Older themes are still present, however, as poetry fights back in an embattled world with tenderness and lyricism, celebrations of family love, and the ramshackle heroism of ordinary people.