No matter their location or occasion, the poems in The Oratory of All Souls attempt to center themselves in fundamental human concerns, especially those connected to personal and community suffering. Their sources are memory, the historical moment, the local objects that compose each, and the "terrible love of our imagination" that makes them new in language. In these poems, the speakers map roads into and out of grief, adopting the role of lover, father, citizen searching for insight or the right way to live. Finally, it becomes a book about breaking and mending, injury and forgiveness, and about our search for resurrection in, and of, daily life.