To details such as the bare branches 'fruited' with birds, the fields' 'froth with flowering grasses' and 'the patience of June flowers', she adds a number of narratives - or parables - in which experience yields a spiritual lesson and consolation. Human life quivers in consort with other lives in these seasons of the heart. Through sharper observation the author aspires to deeper thought, and her book's multiple lights of days and dusk reveal a calendar in which 'unplanted bulbs / are greening themselves from within'.

. . . there is an unusual warmth in her poems, but also a great density and power of experience . . . The essence of her marvellous poems lies in the way she sees through a material world that is rendered truthfully, plainly yet freshly, as when, in age, her 'given name takes on a greenness / it has never held for me before'.
                                                                      -- George Szirtes, The Irish Times