The eight sections in this volume were issued separately in Ireland in limited editions from the Thomas Kinsella’s Peppercanister Press. The first four Peppercanister poems are occasional poems written in 1972 and 1973: Butcher’s Dozen responds to the report of the Widgery Tribunal of Inquiry into the shooting of thirteen Civil Rights demonstrators by the British army in Derry on January 30th, 1972; A Selected Life and Vertical Man elegize the composer Sean O Riada, who died in October 1971; and The Good Fight commemorates the tenth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The poet comments on these poems in an Afterword to the volume. The final sections appeared simultaneously in 1978: Song of the Night and Other Poems, a set of occasional poems touching in different ways on the theme of sex, and The Messenger, a poem written in memory of the poet’s father.