New collection of poems from much-admired German-born poet, long resident n Galway. "In these new poems Eva Bourke leans into what she calls the "heart of things," discovering for herself, and us, time and again that there truly is a heart of things, and to things, and that it might well survive all that conspires against it, even in the most war-broken, besieged, and harm-full places on earth. These poems suggest that the soul is an enduring gentleness in us, in others, in perhaps everything, and that it needs us to release it, to let it breathe, to nourish it with what we create rather than destroy. That gentleness is what we hear throughout the ample and beautiful margins of this book, the notes of its music being played with such care, and played softly, piano." -Fred Marchant Author of The Looking House (Graywolf Press, USA) and House on Water, House in Air (Dedalus Press)