This book-length poem is widely considered to be Kinnell's masterwork. In each of its ten parts, he is a sort of wayfarer in places where death has been, looking for some meaning in what remains. There is much putrefaction and decay in the poem's imagery, yet in the end we are left with a message of hope. Kinnell reminds us that we are all merely wayfarers on this beautiful, sometimes horrifying earth; that countless souls have walked this same ground and that countless more will come when we have left this land of dreams and nightmares.