This collection moves between private and public realms, pondering each from the other's borders. In a series of elegiac idylls, Motion conjures expeditionary narratives of a rural childhood - in scenes as precisely imagined as they are irretrievable - and reconsiders moments of the Victorian past from reticent and surprising angles. There are poems for vanished friends and public figures alike, variously expressed in lyric forms both extended and compact, provoking that most sensitive of concerns: what should we make public, what should be made public of us?