In his debut volume of poetry, Fergusson sets out to explore four themes that, he says, 'resonate with us because of their power to frighten and fascinate.'

The first two of these, Life and Death, are seen through the prism of grief and personal loss. In a world devoid of God, without the solace of an afterlife, we have ultimately only our memories to fall back on, filling us with renewed love and regret.

And it is in these recollections, 'arrested in the crawl of line and verse, ' that we can find Identity and Meaning, the second pair of Fergusson's Four Themes. But our sense of self, he writes, also comes from our place in the community, in landscape, in history and the 'sagas of science.