The poems in Today is the Piano's Birthday are spare, imagistic and suggestive. They cover a range of tones and subjects, moving from love lyrics to a focus on insanity, death and despair. A poem, Michael Harlow says, is: 'a construct of language and space, so that one word discovers another, one perception creates another; so that the poem declares and extends the relationship between the maker and his experience, subsequently between the reader and his perceptions of that experience'.