Powerful historical poems about the nineteenth-century Irish emigration to New Zealand, the colonial wars, Von Tempsky and Te Kooti, as well as moving elegies, love poems, and meditations on the nature of spiritual existence in the intellectual pressure-cooker of the twenty-first century. Accompanying the poems is a selection of haunting images by the painter Garry Currin, produced in response to the title-poem which is the central feature of the book.