Haunted by a sense of loss and foreboding, this fourth collection is rich in poems that raise the quiet mutiny against a withering cosmos. A dark magic works here, sustained by poetry that is often complex, ironic, disquieting, impassioned, and sometimes even wildly comic. In these pages we are confronted with the poet in midair, the Walrus Voluptuary, a tree that becomes a woman, a man with the head of a black swan. The poet's resonant voice convokes a cycle of spellbinding images, both concrete and elusive, that are, indeed, flares burning in the counterfeit night.