Fred Beake is an accomplished author who, besides poetry, has written and edited many volumes of poetry and literary criticism. He writes of his poetry in Places and Elegies, "I have always been interested in the essence of places, but it is really only in recent years that I have begun to look at scenes almost as a landscape artist might, recording particular moments and sights, and making poems from them. Equally in doing this new themes have tended to emerge, notably the decline of the British Empire in the last three pieces."