In this collection, Rose McLarney interweaves the personal and the historical, the geography and the rain and mud, showing how all things are connected and the value and validity of the simple before the large.

Her language and imagery are evocative, but not overly studied, colloguial without being prosy.

Here she likens mistaking a doe for a predatory cougar to her thinking a young man who stops to offer her a lift is a rapist:

The predator’s eyes go gentle as a doe’s
because they are a doe’s. The man rides up, in shining
rims and mirror tinted windows.
And the sunset, which we love for its colored summary,
gloriously reimagines the day

As there is life in her writing, so there is a wistfulness for loss, that which is already past, and that which must soon go:

As if those lives had wandered away from me
and I was the one who would run for days
on a scent-memory toward

an end to which I thought I was bound.

Spending sometime with McLarney in this volume is well worth the travel. ( )