The subject-gamut of these poems is wide: it ranges from meditations on sex (as in the author's fiction) to meditations on American history and politics (black/white relations, draft dodging, presidential politics). The prevailing concern, however, is with tricks of memory, with moments in and out of time, distraction fits when past selves or past lives rise up to re-engulf the "present" person. These poems ring changes on Montaigne's idea of ondoyance, the flux of personality. They are ghost stories in the same way Henry James's works of fiction and of autobiography often are. Ghost stories too (or perhaps especially) in the substantial section of translations with which the volume concludes: the poet assumes or is haunted by the voices of others.