Lawrence Sail's poems balance dream and history, delight and unease: they weigh the art of the possible against the encroachment of time. This substantial retrospective covers work written over four decades. The new poems continue to explore Sail's characteristic themes-the border country between belief and doubt, the interplay of memory and imagination, the possibilities of art, and the context of silence-and they do so with a fresh inwardness. Attentive to the often alluring details of the material and natural world (many of them reflecting the writer's love of the sea), these poems also contemplate the relationship between appearance and essence.