Simmer Dim is a book of roots and epiphanies, of travels that become an inward journey as the poet searches for origins familial and literary, finally discovering what Eliot found in his Four Quartets: 'And the end of all our exploration / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.'

[.....]......many landscapes in France, Greece, Italy, Ireland, England, Scotland, and along the swamps and shores of Florida and Louisiana

(ah, common, if boggy, ground)

We know what those old songs
and stories really are about
bairns born wet and cauled
to Shetland maidens visited
by the nameless in the night
thick black whiskers, slick side
and bullet shape in the green sea
of dream, lingering smell of low tide
in the room, brine in the fur.

And then she marries the harpooner,
a good steady man,
and gets old,
as stories have her held
in swan-foot flippers, down
the seal-king's women taken,
their weed-hair water-waves
on roof the awful house of his,
forever with him dwell in thrall,
memory the surge-light
that pierces gloom of deep sea-hall.

[Seal Dá Saol, by Celia de Fréine]

[The Silkie, by William Greenway]