Forlorn yet resolved in the face of an abrupt change of station, Haddon's speaker makes his way through a Britain that seems composed largely of hotels and rich people, a strange world : "above the confusion of forks// you will realize that is/ where your journey starts." Other poems rewrite horatian odes, imagine "Christmas Night 1930" and effect a "decimation" of John Buchan's novel The House of Four Winds. Technically accomplished and spikily humorous ("You did the Hippy-Hippy Shake/ I messed with Mr. In-Between"), the poems are marbled with scenes of same-sex love and desire, and ruminations on writing, fame and death.