... Good morning brother scallop shell, kinned in calcium,
Self-assembled from the slosh we are,
Hard palate, hard ridge, bone of each other's bone...

from 'Anne's Shells'

In Out of the Air Jeffrey Wainwright gathers ghosts and brings them into earshot. There are elegies in which the daily world of chores and small events offers consolations. In 'The Apparent Colonnades', connections between artefact and life, and between individual lives, are probed.

In 1994 Wainwright said that poetry now has 'the opportunity to combine so many different aspects of experience, knowledge and ways of speaking, and to mix them in a way that is richer, more linguistically - that is to say humanly diverse than any of the argufying discourses it might feed from. Descartes, a child's bedtime memories, geology and evolution (popularly apprehended), a bit of argot and verbal playfulness can co-exist here as in no other form outside the literary.'