In First Things When Robert Rehder views the modern world - our world - with a cool wit. Insights deadly despite a self-deprecating ruefulness spark into view. Rehder's poems inhabit the invented, rootless places that modern society creates: supermarkets, airports and parking garages; the illusory communities of celebrity and the digital universe: 'Instead of friends you have email'. Rehder's humour acknowledges his complicity and skewers the fake and the absurd.

The small Swiss village of Corminboeuf where the poet lives is both a comic and mythic location for a life. Throughout the collection, luminous, poignant poems return us to a larger world that sustains and, precariously, endures: the fading splendour of Venice, a culture we are in danger of discarding, and a series of poems on the mysterious, transforming power of snow. These are poems about everyday things, remembering and forgetting, movies, coffee mugs and the beauty of the natural world.

Cover painting: Frank Stella, Hyena Stomp. 1962 (copyright 2008 Frank Stella / Artists Rights Society, New York).