Brian Kirk’s poetry is a poetry of time and place. In poems of controlled passion and energy, he maps out his territory which, on the surface is domestic, but on closer examination reveals something much deeper. God, religion, family, and above all love as it is in its reality without any dressing or highflown nonsense. The poems here are as tender as they are vulnerable: lovers, children, fathers, sons, uncles – the whole gamut of family life – all are treated with compassion, and whatever questions he raises he never opts for glib or easy formulation. “She walked into the Sheaf of Wheat one night and disappeared.” So opens one of the poems, (Persephone), with the compacted mystery of a Dashiell Hammett. Something has fallen and given way, and Brian Kirk’s poems miraculously sift the wreckage for its poetry and human mystery.