Many of the poems in Dunstan Ward's second collection are set in France, where he has lived since 1973. Some look back to his New Zealand childhood, others are aphoristic or commemorative. In his Landfall Online review of Ward's first collection, Beyond Puketapu (Steele Roberts, 2015), Denys Trussell praised him as a poet with "an intellectual power that sees issues without in the least 'drying up' the poetic anima within him".