the notes of music and sycamore leaves carried to all corners of the battlefield (as in "Sycamore") or a harmonica playing, out in no man's land, a music-hall favourite that "lasts until the end of time," (as in "Harmonica") there is an awesome, tender and terrible symmetry to Longley's exquisite observations, which are, in effect, similar to the other stories he has told in catalogues. What we find in Snow Water is an appreciation of nature which is not simply some sort of taxonomy, but rather a ceremony that is meant to go on forever, trickling through the lives and the lost lives of those in the poetry. Here is poetry of "elegance and pain", white as a cenotaph.