The coastline where sea, land and sky meet, a place of incident and memory, threads through these poems which range through brief lyrics to an imagined account of the marriage of 19th-century missioner Samuel Marsden. The idea of spiritual marriage pervades the book, a union of elements in imaginary and sometimes historical contexts, and appears in different ways in two long sequences, one on the invented life of Italian composer Claudio Monteverdi and the second, "The Milk Horse", about a foundling and the Mother Superior of an orphanage. The poems set out to capture the permanence of some "movements" and emotions and to enact the experience of love.