In "The Chain", Sleigh explores the nature of memory - its ability to recast events in contradictory ways as it links individual lives to history. The poet reveals the ways in which the individual consciousness, alternately resisting and embracing its ancestral legacy, seeks to transform, in order to comprehend, the meaning of cultural inheritance. In a series of elegies, portraits, and love poems, he dramatizes the ambiguous nature of truth and the difficulties the moral imagination must overcome in recalling, understanding, and judging the past.