Grave Reading is the story of a widower surviving loneliness, spiritual isolation, and the tribulations and trivialities of daily life, a journey that starts with nothing more than mementos: his wife's nightgown, her hand-painted lacquer tray, some "seashells and fossils in a shoebox." As the years pass, he travels through realms of loss and emptiness-his own aging and illness, his inner ugliness and outward anger-but gradually rediscovers the love that "lights a memory of her face" and opens the possibility of finding her again in his own heart, where he "left her last / on a hilltop by the sea."