'This gregarious, tender pamphlet criss-crosses the Atlantic: in Pennsylvania, a motorist and coachman each “looks up from his century”; in Belfast, the poet searches “for something déjà vu” among the musics and idiosyncrasies of Belfast. These poems are as infused with the cadences of the city and its poets as they are by half a century and more of American history. The Vietnam War – to which the author’s father was a conscientious objector – is here in the genetic code, so too the trauma of Europe’s wars, and the anxieties and terrors of post-9/11 America. Across the continents, among their people, through language luminous and formally controlled, the war poem and the love poem cohabit and, as they must, coalesce.'

--Stephen Sexton, author of If All the World and Love Were Young and Cheryl's Destinies