Poems and drafts of poems written and annotated by Julia McCarthy and later included in her book Return from Erebus. Includes poems: “In the absence of narrative,” “Return from Erebus” also titled “Returned from Abaddon,” “Imago,” “I do not know your name,” “Ten meditations on ephemera,” “November’s conversion,” “Letters after dark” also titled “Conversation with silence” (later titled “Beneath Cyrillic stars”), “The name that floats on black water,” “A brightly coloured ball,” “News from the prosaic world,” “A mitochondrial whisper” also titled “Kenosis” and “The black forest,” “An animal sadness” also titled “Locking up,” “Taking leave” also titled “Like a sound inhaled” and “Waving good-bye” “The white forest,” “The little black world,” “Snow in August,” “Surrounded,” “On the plain of asphodel” also titled “Daymoon,” “Flying underground,” “False Spring,” “I walk a stony path into the orchard,” “Phenomenology of leaving,” “Twelve red caskets,” “The Weight of who you are,” “Imago,” “Poem in black,” “Something resembling light,” “Kundalini rising,” “Diabolos,” “Hibernacula,” “The mythic pushing,” “The drown” also titled “Erasing the rain,” “Poem in white,” “The white moose,” “Rain on windows” also titled “water on windows” (later titled “Rain in a small room”), “Out of the ordinary,” “What we reach for,” “Erasing the narratives,” “Blind spot,” “Gestalt,” “Circling like a great silence” also titled “Variations on a theme,” “Tuesday,” “In the room of quartz”, “Poem in grey,” “When the white dove appears,” “The poem is an animal” also titled “Wolf watching,” “Palimpsest on a rainy evening,” “A brief history of blue” (later titled “Out of the blue”), “Metallurgical lesson,” “Ontological slang,” “Behind the poem,” “Aphelion,” “Psalms” (later titled “Psalm”), “Angel of loneliness,” “The clouds reach down” also titled “A nephologist’s report” and “Nephology” and “The forest,” and “Noctuary.”

Also contains poems “My widowed heart,” “Almost alone,” “Nothing but this,” “Zero at the bone,” “At the crematorium” also titled “Digging into fire,” “Novae,” “Bifocal,” “Book of clouds 2,” “That space which considers,” “The Hour Glass,” “What no one knows,” “Book of clouds,” “Late November,” “Turning back the blood,” “Wolf and at the door” also titled “The pup/the fortress,” “What the poem said,” “Thrown and altered,” "Pulling the pin," "Apology," and "Excarnation."

Includes a poem by Giacomo Leopardi titled “The infinite,” and personal correspondence and poem by Don Domanski (poem is titled "The poems returning home").