A.F. Harrold's collection is a sequence detailing the illness and death of his mother, but its tone is anything but elegiac. Addressed to the patient, both present and absent, the poems are frank, unflinching and honest. There is love here, but also frustration, bewilderment, confusion and grief. Together the poems explore the spaces where despair, boredom and exhaustion meet, and at their heart describe the difficulty of dying.