The essays in Dailiness are about how a poet makes a poem. For Mark Jarman a poem results from a deliberate and conscious act. He is especially interested in the way human consciousness connects devotional prayer to poetry. In these essays he considers poems written millennia apart--from Gilgamesh to George Herbert's work, from the poems of Robert Frost to those of Seamus Heaney, to his own recently-written poems and those of his contemporaries. As the poems celebrate the work of daily creation, they possess a religious aspect. In Dailiness Jarman sheds light on how poems accomplish this work.