In Roseanne Carrara's "A Newer Wilderness", the world's rich and compelling past buckles and swells beneath our feet, and its abiding influence rises like geothermal steam into the present. Powerful voices from history and legend issue forth and mingle with our familiar, circadian surroundings. These poems serve to remind us that our future need not cost us our past, that our capacity for intellect need not diminish our basic humanity, and that civilisations need not be built at the expense of the natural environment in which they thrive.