I’m delighted to share a gift with my newsletter subscribers: a complimentary Reader’s Companion to my latest poetry collection, The Boxer of Quirinal. In it, I do not explicate the poems; instead, I give a taste of the context in which I was writing — the circumstances that influenced each poem’s coming into being.

Poetry and personal responsibility has always been a troubling issue for me — and for anyone, I think, who tries to reconcile the lives of poets with their poems.

It’s the stuff of bad dreams. Its comes to us again with the second Titanic sinking. There is no such punishment in Dante’s Inferno, but it lives in other poems. And it goes to sea with every sailor.