The pieces here range from a quiet six-line lyric to rollicking mini-epics; they go from homages to the classic sonnet sequence to poems in the form of prose essays or one-act drama. Their subject matter grandly mixes hieroglyphics with newspaper comic strips, science fiction space explorers with Ellis Island immigrants, the sacred inner sanctums of the pyramids with McDonald's golden arches on a day when Wordsworth visits, biblical scholarship with barroom yuks, and the tiny daily triumphs and losses of all of our lives with the exploits of the gods and the limitless pulsing of the universe. In this new book, with the overriding memory of a mother's death by cancer, Goldbarth produces a sequence unified by themes of elegy, mourning, and lamentation, with settings that move from ancient pharaonic burial chambers to one last day at a suburban Chicago nursing home. It is a book of family history, and of intimate moments saved from disappearing into the swirl of time.