The choices we make - between music and silence, impulse and security; between the “torn land” and the “dazzling sea” - feature strongly in this new collection of poems by Paul Henry. A twenty-first century muse is rehoused in the jazz clubs and seedy hotels of European cities. Yet the loss of a mother, a singer, depicted in a sequence which closes the book, brings back to heart what ultimately matters: that early music which shapes all our longings.