The laughing dove and other poems is a collection that celebrates the natural world and our delicate place at the very edge of wilderness. Vernon RL Head sees like a birdwatcher and his unique arrangements of words shape a wondrous fact: Nature waits in the everyday: The freshness of a pavement-city-tree; The smoothness of a rock in a stream of pain; The holes and hopes between the planted flowers of a garden; The thorns of light that make the Karoo; The sea and its need to find the land. Vernon RL Head is an important, new poet. His poems are exuberant, romantic and revolutionary.