Substantial works from the five decades of John Powell Ward's career are featured in this volume of collected poems. Profiled are his writings from early uncollected work to 1969's The Other Man, through his 1980s volumes, To Get Clear and The Clearing, and onward toward a late flowering that included a dramatic shift in style and technique, starting with the remarkable Genesis in 1996 and leading to Late Thoughts in March in the latter half of the 1990s. The book concludes with a selection of new and uncollected poems. Ward fans learn how he evolved a startling, experimental technique focused on letters of the alphabet, and how his wider concerns--history, the human peril to the natural world, and tragic events and their aftermaths--are played out across a formal grid of beautiful complexity.