In The Sheltered Nest the collapse of personal relationships and of old certainties leads to a new search for meaning.

The poems deal with many aspects of upheaval — among them the loss of language, marriage and home — and set against them a series of solitary figures whose strongest feature is their spiritual strength: Wittgenstein; Thomas Merton; members of the Shaker sect.

Blending the delicacy of Japanese poetry with a Western sense of disturbance, the collection is balanced by an undercurrent of love-poems which chart a new direction and form a pattern in which resolution is eventually found.