Mahon writes from lower Manhattan, addressing, in ramble or vigil, his absent lover, his children in London, Auden, Yeats's father, and other cosmic vagrants, "clutching our bits and pieces, arrogant in dereliction." In the eighteen sections of "The Hudson Letter," the gabble of a dockside bar, voices of a recycled Sappho and of an Irish immigrant girl reassuring her mother in Inishannon, and the midwinter, all-night sounds of the City intersperse with the voice of the poet--lively, witty, poignant, elegiac, humane, and thoroughly human. "The Hudson Letter" is prefaced by four new poems in different voices.