These poems cover a range of themes: War and coming of age ("A Vietnam Veteran's Memorial Day"); family (a father who understands his own mistakes when holding his daughter for the first time in "My Old Girlfriends"); and the natural world ("The Pigeons of Chernoble"). But ultimately, the power of Bauer's vision derives from one who, like the voice of his poem "Dry River," has both the luck to wake "from that nightmare of my own drowning" and the unflinching courage to wrestle with the meaning of that survival.