As this indicates, he is by no means a pious writer. Rather, he draws upon spiritual traditions but coins new images and metaphors from science and history. From Soft Keys (1993) to Burning Babylon (2001) and Corpus (2004), odd angles abound on human dilemmas and religious belief amidst scientific developments (from cosmology to the genome project) and the horrors of 20th-century history. And he is equally a poet preoccupied with the body, its life and after-life. His poems are metaphysical but grounded in physical details, examining the appetites and temptations of the flesh, the agonies and ecstasies of love. Such religious and philosophical concerns have evolved with increasing sophistication throughout his five poetry collections and two novels to date.