The bells that break on the morning air at the opening of Theo Dorgan's new collection of poems signal both the beginning of an ordinary day in his native Cork, but also a return to his time as a schoolboy there, a time and place made extraordinary by the attention and focus of a youngster beginning to make sense of the world, and, in particular, learning the weight and power of language ("The words are / awkward, shaping themselves in my head, testing the distance / between what I feel now and what I'm supposed to be.")