Robert Peake

Blaming herself when the cousin she dragged onto a roller coaster falls into a coma, Nora struggles with unendurable guilt and tries to help when her cousin awakens with challenging disabilities.

Robert Peake's incredible eye for detail illuminates a collection of stirring and delicately attuned poems that not only roam but actively seek--travelling far and wide to all manner of places but also moving through time, taking leaps of faith and journeys into memory and sensation. These poems refer to a kind of knowledge that isn't just sought or gained, but is felt and experienced, known in your heart and in your bones as much as in your mind. From postcards to portraits, from ancient and modern wars to cosmopolitan cities, wildlife, and even a tiny ornamental skeleton, Robert Peake finds a sharp focus for the bigger picture both far and wide and closer to home. These carefully-controlled and eloquent poems know the subtle and deep consequences from each small gesture; the ripple-effect across each story, the altering of lives and history; the still, quiet centre from which it all begins.

Written in the seven years following the death of the author s infant son, these poems explore the sometimes quiet and often startling nature of love and grief. Through a range of forms and panoply of figures spiders, fish, a famous cellist, and prophetic apparitions this collection probes what William Faulkner called, "the human heart in conflict with itself".