After many years of honing his craft, Timothy Dekin fashioned a thoroughly contemporary style based on the pentameter line and the song forms of the English Renaissance poets. His formal mastery and control of lines are a rarity in modern American poetry. The compelling immediacy of his confessional tone and his range of feeling - from thoughts on mortality and self-worth, struggles with alcoholism, failings of family love, to a Buddhist-like oneness with nature - make for a striking combination. One moment Dekin confronts his unloving father, and in the next, speaks from a peaceful California setting where he is about to learn a lesson in the Zen of fly-fishing. This collection of poems was painstakingly assembled a short time before the author’s death. It emerges as a work of unusual emotional and spiritual clarity and beauty.