Swallows draws on the various metaphorical implications of the House in its exploration of the uncanny presence and absence of self and world in poetry. From poems concerned with the eighteenth-century inquiry into the whereabouts of Horace’s Sabine Villa - a search determined to locate an actual physical site behind Horace’s celebrated verse - to poems in the final section transcribed from the walls of a house, these poems acknowledge the desire for the presence of the physical in the written, while understanding the necessary distance between writing and the world. Throughout the book, swallows act as a kind of genius loci: presences that arrive and depart continually.