In her new volume of verse, Bowering continues her rigorous, ambitious path and delivers poems that blend a variety of personalities, times, and places that add up to an overall substance she sees as happiness. Like an alchemist of old, she transmutes experiences, perceptions, and perspectives into something richer and rarer despite the passage of years and the loss and death they have brought.Here are lines addressed to family, to a father and mother or, in this instance, to a daughter: "You are a stir of wind,/the scent of rare wood,/your mind mirrors the breath of sages,/your thoughts are new." Places, imagined or as real as a moor in the Scottish Highlands, shimmer and shift like mirages: "In the air, are the tones of wet fingers/on wet glass rims, the harmonies/of water, peat, sedge, lake,/a cup of bottomless grey sky."Much of this startling new book takes the form of a calendar, and it is time that presides throughout, perhaps bringing hope, even happiness, as seen in "December": "Death is of no consequence,/because there is eternity.".