Beginning with its title poem, a political elegy rooted in both Western and Eastern lyrical traditions and set in the elegant gardens of Dumbarton Oaks, this second volume of verse by Johann Moser offers for your pleasure a sumptuous banquet of poetic legacies and achievements.

It includes the delightful sequence "Etudes: For Shakespearian Voices," composed to pay homage to the prosodic and figurative virtuosity of the Bard. Other sequences explore the demands and delights of the rural life, the glory of seascapes, and a host of traditional verse kinds, some of them embracing such macabre expostulations as the Moritat and the Gallows Song.

There's a memorial to the Irish Brigade that fought at Gettysburg that integrates into its Civil War imagery allusions to an ancient Irish battle hymn from the eighth century. The volume concludes with an extensive series of sprightly marionette dance-songs composed in iambic tetrameter couplets and a set of literary "palimpsests" written to perpetuate some features of great literary classics, including Hamlet, Don Quixote, Moby Dick, and the Munchausen "tall-tale" tradition.