Tony Connor's new collection - his seventh in all, and his first since the 1982 `New and Selected Poems' - evokes the spirits of very different places, times and people. The poems move eastwards from America, where he has settled, back to Lancashire where he was born and bred (and where, it transpires, Mr Hubbard had survived Tony Connor's well-known elegy on him for many years), and finally to India. Tony Connor's unsentimental realism is matched, as always, by his broad human sympathies and a firm craftsmanship.

Tony Connor has lived in Middletown, Connecticut since 1971. Born in 1930, he left school at the age of fourteen and worked as a textile designer in Manchester for many years. His first collection of poems appeared in 1962; he is also a playwright and librettist.