Covering a variety of subjects - from the plague and the first danse macabre to the development of perspective and recipes for pigments - the poems in this collection are set in 15th-century France. They explore the end of the mediaeval world and its transition into the Renaissance.

Treating subjects from landscape to sculpture to a 19th century technical encyclopedia, the poet is fascinated with light, glass, mirrors, flame, ice, mercury-things transparent, evanescent, impossible to grasp. Likewise Swensen's lyrics, which, with elliptical phrasing and play between visual and aural, change the act of seeing-and reading-offering glimpses of the spirit (or ghost) that enters a poem where the rational process breaks down. From The Invention of Streetlights Certain cells, it's said, can generate light on their own. There are organisms that could fit on the head of a pin. and...