This collection marks a fascinating point in the poetic career of the late Peter Redgrove, when - at the age of seventy - he decided to strike out in a thrilling new direction.

Using a liberating stepped verse form, he opens up new paths in fresh territory, while consolidating his position as one of the finest poets of the natural world. The questing eye of his imagination is in constant motion: the book is full of doors and stairs and wheels, the movement of light and water, the world's daily transformations. Even his characters are shape-changers - the doctors, dentists, chemists and undertakers are all, in their way, magicians. And, evident throughout the collection, is an undertow of mortality - notably in the extraordinarily moving poems about Redgrove's late father: 'his knowledge went, and mine followed,/ Catch it before/ It leaves like a ghost,/ on these stepped verses'.