This book is a new departure in which he has tried to convey, in glimpses, and through the characters he's met, something of the inner tone and timbre of his long life in three countries. As he's spent a good deal of that life thinking about writing, the poems and experiments in poetry he's included are given a context that are not found in the individual volumes of his work, nor in CHANGES (New and Collected Poems, 1962-2002). This is not an autobiography in the usual sense, but an attempt to give a kind of musical structure to remembered experience, in which ellipses, leaps and silences are essential elements of the narration.