A musical phrase, a dream image, the absence of a lover, fragments of conversation with friends, an atrocity, the fragility and infinite mutability of words . . . each of the 71 poems in this collection proliferates around its transient nucleus. Like cells in a body, they are dynamic repositories of the past, sites for the breakdown and synthesis of experience, receptors and translators of self-generated and external messages. The immediate setting of the poems is Europe, a continent of many languages, whose borders can be porous or impenetrable depending on who wants to cross them. A truly heterogeneous space, whose land- and mindscapes remain deeply scarred - but also nourished - by the events and concepts of not only the twentieth century.

Although the poems in this book written over a period of four years are distinguished by annually changing forms, they have been arranged not chronologically but calendrically.