The poems in <i>Night Mowing </i> find their influence in the natural and the erotic; the biblical and the classical; the aesthetic and the spiritual. The landscape exists as both an ecstatic source of inspiration and as an endangered garden, and the narrator of these poems moves through that landscape in admiration and anguish: trying to preserve his joyful innocence while fully aware of the transience of all that he sees. Each poem in its specifics, whether focusing on a lover, a mountain, a dog, or a critic, wrestles with the universal and sacred, revealing the instinct of the poems to move toward purity and deep feeling even in dark times.