Bicycles, famine, ghosts, grannies, Tibetan Buddhists, Beckettian sighs and Lucian Freud's nudes are all revealed with a rare, and loving, simplicity. His award-winning poetry has always been characterized by its compassion and full of gods but empty of forgiveness. In a closing selection of new poems, gathered here as "Tossing the Feathers", Curtis's wit and heartache surface in a long poem "The Well in the Rain", that faces the loss of his father. This is life-giving, life-affirming poetry, full of loss, love and longing.