The Toronto Star called him a legendary figure in Canadian writing, and indeed George Fetherling has been prolific in many genres: poetry, history, travel narrative, memoir, and cultural studies. This is a representative selection from many of the twelve poetry collections he has published since the late 1960s. Like his novels and other fiction, many of these poems are anchored in a sense of place -- often a very urban one. Filled with aphorism and sharp observation, the poems are spare of line and metaphor; they display a kind of elegant realism: loading docks, back doors of restaurants, doughnut shops with karate schools upstairs. In the introduction, A F Moritz places Fetherling in the modern picaresque tradition in the aftermath of Eliot and Pound, highlighting his characteristic speaker as an itinerant cosmopolitan outsider, a kind of flâneur, impoverished and keenly observant, writing from a position of "communion-in-isolation". He contrasts Fetherlings contemplative intellectualism with that of the public intellectual and highlights this outsiders fellow-feeling, making the poems indirectly political. Fetherling's afterword is an anecdote-anchored exploration of what the poet sees as his two central approaches -- "the desire to create new codes of hearing" and "writing-to-heal" -- and how they are reflected in the collection.