Over thirty years in the making, Davey's careful archaeology of the catalogue of innocence his youthful imagination assembled growing up in and immediately after the Second World War is a work of astonishment. This is no lyrical work of sentimental nostalgia, no attempt to return to a romanticized "simpler past," no rediscovery of "the child within," but rather a careful reconstruction of "the child without." The reader moves through these poems, neither sanitized nor updated by their passage through experience, as one would through a gallery installation of intensely personal epiphanies, both frightening and ecstatic, lucid and obscure.