Born into a Island family, haunted by a cruel, redeeming, widow-making sea, Angela Hibbs transforms the plain, moving intervals and sometimes lurid bric-A-brac of a Canadian working class upbringing into something as gratifying as loose tobacco rolled into a mail-slot flier for smoking after a long day. With her mother, newly enlisted in The Canadian Forces and seeking a better life at a succession of mainland bases, the young poet finally escapes The Rock. She takes along her uprooted, meticulous gaze, memorably describing the peripatetic, close-quartered, nervous life of army families and their offspring.