The framing of Donna Aza Weir-Soley’s collection is time, the moral necessity of human connection and its fragility through human difference. Writing in her maturity, time is the present of learnt experience when you know there are men who “will pickle you/ in a jar of formaldehyde/ to store against future impotence, / cankerous seasons/ imminent dissolutions, / loveless marriages”. Time is also the coming to terms with those earlier selves who shaped the person you are: the person who in youth lived through migrancy from Jamaica to the USA, of being “light years away from my tribe” and the feeling of homelessness that can result in “clogged, septic longing”. Beyond the self, is an acknowledgement of the condition of the tribe through the time that reaches down into the past centuries of Black suffering, that leaves the poet wondering “Perhaps we are soul-tired,/ and stay down longer/ after being knocked to the ground”. But time can heal too, when with a once estranged father, “like dew my outrage evaporates/ in your sun-hot love.” There are the compromises to make, as in the poem “Let the Dead Stay Buried”, which acknowledges the inevitably different relationships of Black people to the past, where “your uncomplicated island woman” has to decide whether to risk a sensuously satisfying relationship or be true to the knowledge of the “deadly history hidden in my depths”. There is pain here – a brother in agony from sickle cell, and multiple deaths but there is also the rich humour of a mother who gives “notoriously bad advice”, and the example of the “sister survivors and warrior queens” like Aunt Bertena who “rerouted streams, changed fates”, and above all, the faith that knows that “The rain continues to fall on the just and the unjust alike”.