This poetry collection delivers an exploration of the vagaries, ironies and responsibilities of familial and romantic relationships. It probes the evolution of self, self-consciousness, and the interior psychological landscape - the effects of our past patterns and influences on the present.

Death haunts the pages of Natural Causes, but so does compassion and love. There is little darkness here, and less despair, despite the abundance of cemeteries, loss, and ghosts--both real and imagined.

Mark Cox's youthful bravado has given way in these poems to an assured sense of understatement. The weight of fatherhood, the loss of a grandmother, the fear of loneliness--these are the details around which Cox plumbs the depths of mortality and memory.

Fully comfortable with the domestic tableau from which he writes, this is a poet never complacent. The penchants for...