In this collection, her second, Hilary Davies demonstrates again the ferocity of imagination that characterised her first, The Shanghai Owner of the Bonsai Shop (1991). Her interrogations of faith and friendship bring to life, in a language strikingly rooted in the physical world, spiritual concerns that span centuries. There is a moral seriousness in these poems which confronts doubt and fear, and survival itself, asserting at all times an unsentimental belief in the redemptive power of the human capacity to love. This is particularly so in the two main sequences, which recreate the lives of the cave dwellers in prehistoric France, and the doomed love affair of Abelard and H�loise.