Compression in the truest sense: In 17 allusive long poems, we journey to the south of England, traverse mythical landscapes around Lizard Point and Land’s End, marvel at the chalk cliffs of the Seven Sisters before the wild sea, explore Cornwall and the counties of West Sussex, Wiltshire, Devon, Somerset, visit Arundel and Chagall's stained glass windows in Chichester, stand before the delicate church tower of Salisbury (and also venture to Old Sarum), to Lacock Abbey, Exeter, Bath, etc. Foxes and pheasants cross our path. Casually, we encounter women and men who once lived here - what is time but the shadows we cast: Virginia Woolf and her husband Leonard, poets William Wordsworth and Siegfried Sassoon, the Nine Days Queen Lady Jane Grey - very few of us are what we seem - William the Conqueror and Eleanor of Aquitaine or Lord Chancellor Thomas Becket, the architect of the Minack Theatre and the 'Tree Saint' Juliana Popjoy: they all have no desire to die, no longing for fame. Mortality is merely the passing of the baton. Peter Clar's poetry, as universal as it is subjective, unfolds in length and breadth, even in a graphic sense. The outer merges with the inner into intimate linguistic images. The words that settle in the poet and love: they are only borrowed and too grand for everything, too small for everything.