"I have appointed myself detective to my own life," David Adès writes in "Today's Weather." And nothing escapes the gaze of this persistent and perceptive investigator. This strange and unusual sort of detective work is undertaken not with any expectation of finding clear answers, but with finding a way to live with the realisation that they will never be found.  The result is a book of bifurcations and multiplications; of roads taken and not taken; of living between the "here" and the "there"; of presences that look like absences, and absences that are oppressively present; and "of every prior certainty/burnt beyond recognition" ("Smoke").
 
The unexamined life, we were told many years ago, is not worth living. David Adès has taken this advice to heart; and through his rigorous scrutiny of a rich interior live, he has produced a volume of poems worth living for.