In his foreword to this book, Derek Mahon notes that P.J. Kavanagh's poems 'elude the obvious categories. He has never been one of a school'. A poet of rural England, yet of Irish ancestry, Kavanagh 'has always stood slightly apart'. He championed the poems of Ivor Gurney and shares with Gurney not only a personal landscape (that of Gloucestershire) but a poetic commitment to the actual and specific, to nature writing at its most rootedly precise. His is, in Mahon's words, 'a unique personal record': 'a lifetime's dedication has produced its rich results'.