Included in this collection are the poet Gillian Clarke's personal verses and stories from farmers in her family, her neighborhood, and Wales. There is an instinctive and deliberate unity of theme and idiom in this book, and its open structure naturally allows for the incorporation of her seven rock poems, written for the national Botanic Garden of Wales, as well as those based on archaeology, war, and urban violence. The collection's title sequence charts the journey of a virus in the "plague year," which comes from outer space and travels on a fox's paw, on the beak of a kite, on a crow, and on a buzzard.