Late is both an elegy for and a celebration of life in our century as we approach the end of the millennium. In the spirit and style of Michael Hamburger’s much-admired sequences Variations, Travelling and In Suffolk, it is a narrative meditation in a developing series of short passages. In some of his most musical and subtle lyric writing, it draws together the abiding concerns of his poetry: the cycles of the passage of time, the interrelation of past and present, of continuity and change, in both the natural and the social and historical worlds.