This book of unassumingly daring poems is Brian Bartlett's most personal and historical collection, filled with the lives of his family, ancestors, and neighbours. Bartlett finds poetry in crossword puzzles, an island's flotsam and jetsam, a young soldier's letters, and his son's discovery of newborn spiders.

A meditation upon time, The Watchmaker's Table includes an address to Time itself, apocalyptic visions of a stark future, and a watch's wanderings. Wrestling with the years as if he were both Jacob and the angel, Bartlett presents a startling evocation of time's dominion and human mutability.