The poems which comprise The Early Days of This remind us of the impermanence of most things. Even the thick black curls of youth one day fall onto what becomes " ... a forest floor thick with moss and shadow." What is inevitably lost is counterbalanced by the hope and beauty found in buried lilies of the field still capable of blooming, the perseverance of forsythia with raggedy tendrils, and swallows catching the souls of the dead. All the while we, like Parisians outside a fire-scarred Notre-Dame, wait for a great bell to again ring out.