Once again, Lee returns to the land of his youth in order to turn the fertile earth so it yields a harvest with an almost extra-sensory connection to the soil. However, in this relatively eclectic collection the subject matter of the poems range from Lee’s signature concern with the land, to poems inspired by the holocaust, the first world war, the War of 1812, to bull fighting. And Lee never takes the easy path to the telling of a story. His heartbreaking poem “… if this is a poem, then it’s a miserable failure,” tells a story of a concentration camp where the ashes must be washed from the strawberries before they can be eaten. In “The Lonesome Postmaster of Antarctica,” he achieves a comparison between his own young self, and the selfishness of his youth when he failed to respond to his father’s serious illness, and that melancholia felt by an imaginary postmaster in the remote sub arctic winter in Antarctica.  And as it is in every book he writes, he has woven a single mischief into the fabric. Something which like the koan of Zen teaching, teases the reader to take the journey, not towards the answer, but rather by simply participating in the delight that comes from not knowing, never quite arriving, simply engaging and thereby participating in the miracle of being.    As he writes in his riddle at the end …  ‘Without Within’  the thing without the thing within without within the thing without