These are poems of maturity, enriched by a lifetime of reading and observing, and written in a variety of forms and metres. They record and celebrate places the poet visited in the course of a single year, ranging from Arctic Norway to Ravenna and from the moors of Lancashire to the Hebrides, people he met or avoided meeting, thoughts that lodged, often irritatingly, in his mind. They do so, for the most part, with wry amusement and detachment, sometimes with anger, always with gratitude for the fact of being alive. They are best treated as occasional stimulating company, read two or three at a time.