Between the birth of the poet’s daughter and the deaths of his parents, the poems in Monsoon Diary attempt to make sense of the world, from a mid-life flight from home en famille to new perspectives on both the past and the future.

Monsoon Diary strikes an often elegiac tone, betraying a growing awareness of mortality and the many losses that come with age.

But it also bears witness to a country transitioning from dictatorship to democracy, finds the seeds of a new half-crown of sonnets in a line of Catullus, and, in Driving to Delvin, a poem of 84 couplets, breaks out into a kind of road movie of spirited and sometimes random association, bringing all of the book’s many themes and ideas, its fears and hopes, together in a celebration of forward motion, of living itself.