‘Poetry was always a natural thing to me, part of letter-writing and simply another way of responding to the world’. Thus the author prefaces this substantial new collection of poems, in strict form and in free verse, including a number published previously - in ‘The Counting Stick’, ‘A Share of the Wind’, and ‘Amoretti’, all published by Aquila Press, or in anthologies and magazines - some of them ‘re-appearing’ here with revisions. Informing this fresh view of his work are three of his father’s ‘Six Sea Poems’. The collection is introduced by Alan Riach, who describes ‘the world John Purser makes for us in his poems, as in his music and his scholarship’ as ‘archipelagic, characterised by diversity and depths, bright sunlit perceptions and profundities of insight into the nature of the earth itself, and as far out as the music of the spheres permits us …’.