This is a collection of poetry and essays by the enormously gifted writer, musician and academic Professor Julian Wolfreys. Accompanied by numerous photographs and paintings, the book takes us on a journey through: our sense of place - grief and trauma - memory and recollection - memory and narrative - chance, coincidence and meaning - love - the sense of mood and feeling - absence - language - reading - allegory - imagination - and much more. Each essay, appearing on the right (recto), faces a matching poem. The poetry (printed verso) is often the beautifully and minutely observed account of an event, action, remembrance, plant or bird. Sometimes the essays explain or offer context for the matching poem, and other times the essay is replaced by a photograph or one of Judy Rodrigues' inveigling paintings. But, while the essays are often 'hard work', inviting us to grapple with the finer points of linguistics and etymology, they are often also light, playful, and beautiful. Julian Wolfreys is an extremely distinguished poet...his poems strive again and again to understand, from the perspective of whatever moment he writes a poem now, what occurs in an event, a crisis, and how to bear witness, to find adequate words for it....read these wonderfully melodious and powerful poems for yourself and in your own way. Reading them has been a great, but troubling, delight for me. --J. Hillis Miller (Literary Critic and Distinguished Research Prof. of English & Comparative Literature at the University of California Irvine) Subject: Poetry]