In this Second Edition, Revised and Expanded, Wilson has completely revised the poems to attain a more classical perfection and restored their original published ordering as four sequences, beginning with "The Violent and the Fallen," "Four Verse Letters," and "La Rochefoucauld's Ghost," and culminating in the new poems collected as "The Christmas Preface."

"In James Matthew Wilson's newest collection of poems he continues to show his command of major themes of many ranges of contemporary experience in a style that is unusually complex, but always exact, profound and deeply insightful. In this new book, his best poems, those concerning matters of the soul, place him among the finest poets writing today."-Helen Pinkerton Trimpi