Lawrence Sail's new collection is wide ranging in its scope. For me the themes that emerged most obviously were time and mortality. Also there are poems celebrating individual treasured moments, and precious nature all around us. In Anagrammatic, which is the first poem in the collection, there are shades of Eliot's Four Quartets in the "imprecision" of language whilst retaining a playfulness in which love can become a "short tailed mouse". The collection ends with the acrostic poem Asphodels. I asked the poet at a launch event about how he had ordered the poems, but will leave you to join in the fun and the playfulness of finding that out for yourself. However, I will hint that Zigzags feature both in an eponymous poem, but are also seeded in other poems. There are poems ranging from Africa to the Ribblehead viaduct, but all convey joy in a moment in Nature from the "menorah on blue" of a winter sycamore, to the sea which Sail admits to being challenged to convey its "muscle" There is Mayflower which links the original Mayflower voyage with our "new" journey to care for our world, its people of all nations and planet. This links with the prescient Falling Back to Earth. There are poems of joy in the individual moment (his daughters' spontaneous dancing in Pas de Trois (of course Sail's interest in music is reflected throughout the collection) Surprisingly for me the moment of joy is juxtaposed with moments of dying and death. In Shine a life is "diminished " and shrunken to one small room, yet the dying person has a radiance. In a poem to remember Sail's good friend and fellow poet Helen Dunmore, Birdcall, there is joy in the beauty of the blackbird 's song before "the silence following" This reminded me of a book Dear Life written by a palliative care doctor Rachel Clarke in which she recounts how dying patients respond to nature even if it is just a view through a window. I found these two poems poignant and deeply moving. Sail's collection reflects the rich tapestry of life from those moments of awareness of our own mortality, to moments of joy in the observation of something small we see in nature. There is an acknowledgement of love and those precious memories that help make us. All of these are expressed in the language that is both playful, inexact and yet precise. All those contradictions of what has been in our consciousness and subconscious, that only a poet can express. To misquote and paraphrase Eliot’s Prufrock “That is what I meant . That is it, after all." Tracey Exeter High Street