Martin Harrison (1949-2014) prepared and delivered this final manuscript at the end of a prolific creative life. With the vulnerability of a lover, the poet peels back one cover of truth after another; reckless for the evidence of the senses, he sifts light, sound and smell. Poems like the skin of a world: breathing, walking, touching. Martin Harrison’s culminating poetic achievement is a crossing over, stylistically, thematically, emotionally. Mapping the tragic chiasmus of love and death, it finally asserts the transcendent power of poetry to bear witness, to join us in a greater communion.

Cosmopolitan and local, these triumphs of a ‘late style’ remind us what poetry is when its mastery allows the irony of existence to walk naked and to exult.