At the heart of Maurice Riordan's third collection is a sequence of eighteen dramatic idylls set in rural Cork in the 1950s, in which the subdued microcosm of farm and smallholding - of boundary, townland and parish - is defined through the individual voices of the poet's father and assorted friends, farmhands and neighbours (Moss, Dan-Jo, Davey Divine, the Bo'son, Uncle Tom the Buck, the Gully). The settings of these loosely contiguous fragments almost casually define a historical community, ranging around farm and fields, through furze and ragwort, headland and plantation, haggard and Bog - tracing the immemorial scenes of traditional farming life: cutting drains, harvesting, fencing, potato planting, beet topping †and their close and intimate topography is recalled with a Proustian fidelity to names (the Long Field, the Kiln Field, the Small Fields, the Hill Fields, Higgs's Field, the Passage, the old Deer Park, the Orchard, the Bottom Glen)