Poetry is to be found in everything around us, in the simple everyday events of our lives, in the small things we think and feel and do, in our most private thoughts and innermost concerns. All we have to do is pause and take the time to look and listen and heed. The poems in this book are gleaned from a kind of poetic journal kept by the author over a period of time to record whatever he was thinking and whatever was of immediate importance. Taken all together they trace an intellectual as well as an actual journey through the inner thoughts and outward events of a lifetime. They are crafted in a modern idiom out of plain, unadorned words in free verse lines that mirror the patterns and natural rhythms of spoken language, creating a connection between the poet and the man on the street. These are private poems, made no less private by sharing them, conceived and written with no real thought of anyone ever reading them. They were impelled nevertheless by that most basic of all human impulses, the need to communicate with others. And in that spirit they are presented here. Thomas Grissom is also the author of three other collections of poems: Other Truths, One Spring More, and Neither Here Nor There, all from Sunstone Press. He lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico and is Emeritus Member of the Faculty at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. In addition to poetry Grissom is the author of several works of fiction as well as non-fiction.