Seated at a table in the celebrated Brasserie Lipp, the author experiences 'this in- / fernal ticking in the ink' and finds memory coming alive, recovering past moments as intensely present, spots of time which vivify him and his past.

Through memory and poetry he experiences revelation of a Christian depth. England is a familiar yet now a foreign country: the author having written for years in French. 'English becomes / a strange tongue echoing readily with names / gainrising with the new-born world they name.' Distinct recollections open into one another, restored and changed in language. Music and painting, too, are evoked as windows on this world.

The book includes ninety poems organised into thirty sections, each with three poems which are free-standing yet connected, speaking together. His English takes its bearings from the stress patterns of Anglo Saxon prosody. Not only the poet but his language itself returns to its beginnings.

Michael Edwards taught at the universities of Warwick and Essex, before being elected Professor of Literary Creation in English at the Collège de France, Paris. Early volumes of poetry and critical works appeared in England; he then turned to French for further collections of poetry and numerous works on European literature, painting and music, on philosophy, language, and the Bible. The first Briton admitted to the Académie française, he has an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Cambridge, where he is also an Honorary Fellow of Christ's College. He has been awarded the OBE and a Knighthood in Britain, and the Légion d'Honneur in France.