In a voice freighted with passionate commitment to life in all its ugly loveliness, Beverly Cummings writes with intensity and raw honesty of her intimate connections to the world, large and small. Her gaze moves from a well-tended window box to the street peopled with assorted neighbours and strangers, and records what she sees with compassion, and in striking images. Cummings practices her art in the wake of insanity, of relationships present and past, and in the face of solitude and death. This book, her second, is an elegant, concise collection of new poems that many times take the form of ghazals. Though often dark, it pulses with humanity and hard-won serenity.