A collection of lyric pieces, The Time of Icicles is anchored in the author's experience of Newfoundland, but these poems are of a continent, a century. An underlying preoccupation of the volume is with states of struggle-of people, cultures, vegetation, of language itself. Moving from moods of sly irony to haunting sadness, this music of dissolution in one sense sabotages its own cry, for it affirms, in its wide-ranging allusiveness and its suppleness of line, the joy of wordmusic. Out of the wreck of contemporary existence what can be salvaged? An undaunted looking, a saying, a singing. Singing become act.