This collection draws upon Bowen's two previous collections--Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong, a Progressive Magazine "Pick of the Year," and Forms of Prayer at the Hotel Edison (both Curbstone Press)--and adds some forty pages of new poems. Earlier poems naturally focus on questions of war and peace but, as Bowen now spends a good deal of time in Ireland, there are several new poems dealing with the west of Ireland, and stories of family members who left or stayed behind. Bowen is Director of the Joiner Center for the Study of War and Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and a recent recipient of a Creative Writing Fellowship in Poetry by the National Endowment for the Arts.