Against backcloths which include Utah where he lived for a year and the Dee estuary of north Wales, his home area, Davies' fascination with other people has sparked a diversity of forms, voices, stories. Underlying his variety, there is too an urgently sustained focus. The tension between rootedness and movement, two ways of being, makes for a collection that is itself a story from what Outposts called "this interesting and accomplished poet." Flight Patterns is John Davies' fourth collection, the first since The Visitor's Book, for which he shared with Vikram Seth the Poetry Society's Alice Hunt Bartlett Award in 1986.