Look beyond the everyday meaning of the title phrase, and hear a summing-up of life itself: one day we come into the world, one day we leave it again - and what is the time between, what is our whole span on earth, if not a pause for ‘breath’? Diverse in subject, style, and mood and rich in contrasts - from the public and collective to the personal and private, from the lyrical to the rhetorical - the poems in this collection are a meditation on time, aging, and mortality, sounding the human condition at a moment of world-change.