Symphonic in structure and epic in scale, Slow Clocks of Decay explores universal themes through the lens of one of Ireland's most imaginative poets. Dealing with crises all-too familiar today - the loss of friends to suicide; the insidious nature of depression; the inevitability of ageing; and living as an atheist in a society not quite recovered from its quasi-theocratic past - the book climaxes in a bravura sequence that imagines the poet's own final journey as a fantasia of Hitchcockian intrigue set in a Paris of the imagination.