Winner of the Whitbread Prize for Poetry, Bernard O'Donoghue's poems have long captivated readers with their lyricism, their grace and with what John Burnside has called their 'scrupulous honesty'.This judicious selection, made by the author himself, draws on twenty years of work and presents O'Donoghue at his most mesmeric: often recalling the rural Cork of his upbringing as seen against the exile of his adulthood, ever alive to the desire but impossibility of return.