Many of the poems in this collection are written for people whom they celebrate and remember. They include a homage to Sorley Maclean, ’A Fern from Skye’, and the ’Elegy for the Welsh Dead’, perhaps the finest poem about the Falklands War ever written. Blodeuwedd is concerned with both personal loss and the organisation of death on a massive scale, by famine or war. Almost half the book is devoted to the remarkable ’dance poem’, a modern retelling of the Blodeuwedd story from the Mabinogion, in which Blodeuwedd and her lover plot the death of her husband. No poet in Wales has been so influenced by Welsh language poetry as Tony Conran. His work is a continuing experiment in adapting Welsh traditions, in both form and subject, to English writing. The result is a powerful and humane poetry.