Climbing the Light begins and ends with poems of affection and gratitude and contains poems which treat various other preoccupations — naming, persecution and racial injustice. Translations from the Irish, Italian and Galician further suggest the range of Pearse Hutchinson's concerns.

'Manifest Destiny', a rancorous political satire levelled at the leaders of the Anglo-Saxon world and the slavish attitudes common in contemporary Ireland, connects with a more recent theme: the threat to rus in urbe and Nature's heroic resistance of almighty developers of Dublin. A vital part of this new subject is the celebration of colour, natural and man-made, and of music — from the owl singing in the quiet night in Galicia to an Irish friend playing the penny-whistle in Amsterdam and a great sean-nós singer in a pub in Leeds.