Night Office is the initial publication from among a small set of long poems for which the collective title is The Calendar. Each poem relates to the others as the points, not in a line, but of a star: none need be considered as first or last. Each explores those manners in which the invisible life of the soul throws off from itself tunes, colours, times, histories and nations; each, from verse constraints upon syllable and intonation, works towards the concrete freedoms of poetic thinking. Night Office listens out, through its long white night, for the silencing of human sounds - as these last fall asleep into their signs. - S.J.