The last sequence includes some marvellous vignettes of loving kindness between parents and children, but they are presented as something that only other people can ever have, and the final pages of the book are memorable for their bleak and desperate sadness.
With bleak whimsy and sweet sadness, Perillo's poetry — a body of work spanning more than 20 years — celebrates a world that often hurts her.
With bleak whimsy and sweet sadness Perillo offers what perspective she can on a life that sent her as a young woman from a ranger station to a wheelchair as a result of multiple sclerosis.
That had a different kind of sadness, a bleak, brutal, tragic end to hopes for a greater future and the buoyant few years of his presidency... the opening up of the White House to artists and musicians; I can't deny those few years were glamorous, being on the presidential yacht for the America's Cup races, the parties with the White House en fête.
"Cecil made a low disparaging murmur," another character says something "with a brave little quiver," the same character says something "with a little stricken look," someone else says something "with an air of momentary concession," and the Augustinian despond after sex is described as "the bleak little minute of irrational sadness".
But there is something more, a bleaker humour, imbued with a sadness that reflects the absurdity of the human condition.
Laced through with sadness and music, his story is bleak but layered with tenderness.
Even the relentless morbidity of the Great War poets, their understandable obsession with burial, bleak pastoral and lovers left behind, was in a continuum with the late-19th-century sadness of Thomas Hardy and A.E. Housman, whose young men are ineluctably drifting towards their deaths.
Just as the freezing snow of bleak midwinter is best enjoyed from behind a window, with a lovely open fire, so the sadness of a Christmas movie tends to come with a crackle of sentimental human warmth.
