This collection of poems is both celebration and elegy, paying homage to everyday beauty and documenting and protesting its degradation and neglect. The poems move along distinct threads: poems of ocean and river; those that draw insight from or give voice to birds and animals; and others that tell or retell the experiences of real and mythical women. Activist though they are, the poems in this collection avoid the didactic, preferring the intricacies of attempting to understand, redress and find a way to live with loss and environmental change. They inhabit many forms and voices: news reports; bird song; other poets; even the tide itself, and speak to us with tenderness, urgency and optimism.