A strange assortment of characters inhabit these poems, including George Mackay Brown, Johnny Cash, William Dampier, a lion-keeper in wartime Afganistan, and a shipload of sailors in a Shetland churchyard. The long central work of the collection provides an elegiac meditation on the life and death of a young soldier who succumbed to hypothermia during the Napoleonic Wars. Finally, and quite unexpectedly, the poem "Googlisms" provides an outpouring of quirky definitions from a website that collects information from the search engine Google.