This book is a new departure in which he has tried to convey, in glimpses, and through the characters he's met, something of the inner tone and timbre of his long life in three countries. As he's spent a good deal of that life thinking about writing, the poems and experiments in poetry he's included are given a context that are not found in the individual volumes of his work, nor in CHANGES (New and Collected Poems, 1962-2002). This is not an autobiography in the usual sense, but an attempt to give a kind of musical structure to remembered experience, in which ellipses, leaps and silences are essential elements of the narration. Keith Harrison taught literature, Creative Writing and Environmental Studies for three decades at Carleton College, where he was Professor of English, sometime editor of the Carleton Miscellany and one of the founders of Environmental Studies Program. His poems, essays and plays have appeared widely throughout the English-speaking world and his translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, first published by the Folio Society of Great Britain, is a long-time member of the World's Classics series of Oxford University Press.