Desmond (Des) Kenny, whose collection: My Sense of Blind received such welcome and deserved praise, turns in this collection to the poetry of love, relationships and the nuanced moments and occurances of family and loved places in his Past Tense. The gentle movements of Past Tense are expressed with tender and considerate care; where Kenny walks quietly through the rooms and tended gardens of his experience; showing now the tossed quilt of domesticity, the wonder of children and the 'bottled memories' of a considered life; and now the incense-filled hope and wonder of the caged bird released, in acquiesence, to the temporary freedoms. The freedoms that allow for the brief, prayerful statements and expressions of hope and love. Past Tense is not the fossilized record of those occurences and experiences. It is a crafted retelling, which walks the reader through the focused disc of the moongate to the happenings beyond: where the moon itself: "Glides on limbs of shadow past Houses of its quarter light" In that light are seen the shadowed and acute angels of life's brief perspectives, the loss, the joy and the worked earth of Past Tense.