The poems in the book take the reader through the first year of working old Merino farmland on the NSW Southern Tablelands, through frost, drought, bushfire threat and back to frost. The manuscript is disarming: apparently conversational, the poems are liltingly structured but work by accretion towards discovery of the ecology of place and insights into what it is to be human. An extended meditation centred on the land, the sequence twists, evolves and dances around its subjects of climate, regeneration and history, while still feeling entirely focussed on the changes wrought by, and on, the dirt.
