These poems - profound yet accessible, contemporary yet classical, eloquent and dynamic even when apparently most despairing - distill one poet's somewhat jaundiced look at modernity, from the Renaissance and the philosophical revolutions of the seventeenth century to the nihilism of postmodernism, from the death of God to the bankruptcy of humanism, from the midnight of the Enlightenment to the immortalized barbarism of the internet. Yet behind all of these poems, supporting them like a hand, lies the passion that drives all of existence, old or new - the ferocious and uncompromising demands of love.