Spanning more than four decades of Clive Wilmer's poetry and translations from several languages, this collection begins with a fable about a walled city and concludes with a recent translation of Osip Mandelstam's "Hagia Sophia." Uniting intense feeling and powerful images with a strong sense of order, it not only features Wilmer's previous works alongside a substantial body of new poems, but also fuses the erotic and the sacred in a way that recalls the traditions of mystical literature.