The first section describes an experience in Australia which provides a starting point for reassessing his past relationships and loves. The second returns to Ireland, its people and places, the celebrated and the unknown.

The third section is a meditation on his daughter's marriage, placing within an historical and sacramental context a very personal event. And finally, in some of his most daring and original writing, Durcan describes his own twentieth-century romance, replete with ecstasies and inevitable agonies, beauty and hope, but also brutality and self-abasement.