Andrew Hamlin's sequence is a string of tiny snapshots, each one catching an ordinary moment and leaving it unexplained. A woman laughs at her grey pubic hair through new glasses. A little girl on a scooter loops past an ambulance. A man pressure-washes into a windstorm, and the spray becomes ghosts. The speaker watches closely and with a kind of wry affection, finding odd beauty in bodies, weather and street life.
Other poems turn inward. Someone is kicked to the curb yet feels lucky to have a stoplight and a cold snap. An argument over thrown-out bread is one the speaker doesn't want. A shrivelling erection, the closing gull that receives his loneliness: these admit embarrassment and ache without fuss. The mood is quiet, humorous and a little lonely, but never self-pitying. Time, aging and fading light run underneath, and the poems suggest that noticing small things is how the speaker gets through the day.