Stanley Moss dedicates these poems ‘to departed friends: human, canine, arboreal, avian’, setting the tone for a collection that is celebratory, occasional, salutatory. Striking out at ‘Sunrise’, the poems move through sections for ‘Noon’, ‘Sunset’, and ‘Eclipse’.   As light turns to shade, and shade to darkness, the viewpoint matures, grows deliberative, more aware of a pressing mortality. History, religion and cosmology proffer their solaces; death and grief are redeemed as tradition or rite, acts of god or fate. Ultimately it is the will to think, to remember, and to memorialise that offer solid foundations: ‘It took time before I took my time’, writes the poet. Moss creates a wonderfully peopled and cultivated world – one that is wild, giving, ephemeral.