Dave Bonta's poem begins with a small, almost comic paradox: a traveller on an island who keeps looking for other islands. Its title, "2013 in photos: British Isles," suggests a year's travel snapshots, and the poem reads like a sequence of quick, framed images. Underneath the sightseeing is a question about what it means to want to possess a place, or to understand it. The ending turns that question back on the speaker.
The opening images shrink the world. The islands are "smaller, emptier, round as up-turned / coracles barnacled to the shore," a comparison that makes rock into boats and boats into creatures clinging to the coast. Yachts "catch the only sunlight," and the speaker's mind slides to "greenstone axeheads / sunk in ceremonial lakes," objects deliberately given away to water. Then the longing itself shrinks: "Smaller and smaller my longing grew / until it could almost fit in a watery pocket." Desire becomes something pocketable, like a souvenir or a stone picked up on a beach. The next line undoes it: "these islands could not be kept."
The poem's middle is built on repetition. "They were Holy Islands, they were bird islands, / they were columns of cooled magma, / they were the skulls of ancestors." Each "they were" offers a different way of seeing the same place, as sacred, as natural habitat, as geology, as burial. The list moves from the landscape to the human, and the skulls "killed three times— / once each for sky, land and water" bring in ritual. The poem never says what lies behind that image. The effect is of ancient lives glimpsed only through what they left behind, which the speaker is trying to read. The "collars of bog iron" and "round houses roofed with turf" keep the focus on small, handmade objects.
Circles run through the poem. The islands are "round," the houses are "round," and in the most inventive turn, the traffic island "can only be circled in one direction / like the stars wheeling about Polaris." The speaker's word "stoplights" is an American one, so the vocabulary suggests an outsider looking at British roundabouts. Seen that way, the roundabout becomes a small cosmos, a modern island that turns daily traffic into something as regular as the night sky. Everyday road rules and ancient ritual start to look like versions of the same human impulse to move in patterns.
Formally, the poem is twelve unrhymed couplets in free verse. The lines run on, often breaking mid-phrase ("round as up-turned // coracles"), so the sentences spill across the white space between couplets as water would across stones. The short stanzas also feel like snapshots, each a frame, which fits the photographic title. The tone stays conversational and dry until the last lines, which makes the closing shift more striking.
That shift comes with "Riding across the Salisbury Plain, I soon got lost." The speaker, who has been interpreting the past all poem, now imagines being interpreted himself: "Millennia from now, archaeologists will say / How hungry for a glimpse of other worlds / these islanders must've been!" The joke works in several directions. The future scholars will misread a tourist's wandering as a culture's spiritual longing, and the speaker is gently mocking his own habit of projecting meaning onto stones and skulls. But the mistake may also be half right. His longing to see "other islands" is real, and "islanders" fits everyone in the poem, each person a small separate land looking across water at others.
The poem is significant for how much it does in so few lines. It treats travel, archaeology and desire as versions of the same act, reaching for something that can't be held. It accepts that our readings of the past are guesses, while still insisting that guessing is worthwhile. The final image makes the speaker an exhibit as well as an observer. Instead of closing on a grand statement, the poem leaves its reader with a modest, human lostness.