Taking the Back Road Home's fifty-one poems detail the life of a poet, commemorating his day-to-day encounters with friends, family, neighbors, and coworkers, as he celebrates "the dedication of the self to useful occupations," as well as his more mystical experiences with his wife and with nature. The poems absorb the reader into the writer's existence and grant the imagination free rein within his timeless, imagistic world, where "the empty sky. . . / Is a huge music box with smooth duplex combs / Musing us into taking the back road home."