Vicar's Tunes, a collection of seventy-one hymns, gives wings to excellent religious poetry by contemporary poets with their often profound theological insights, and it provides fresh settings for traditional texts that still speak to the needs of our time. Inspiration for many of the tunes in this collection came from the texts to which they are mated, but in some cases, the accompanying texts were written expressly for previously composed tunes, a reversal of the more usual procedure.