"These essays are forays into what Wordsworth called the "hiding places" of the creative impulse. Sometimes in aphoristic form, this selection of meditations on the arts of poetry and teaching functions as an indirect self-portrait and probes the poet's Irish heritage.

For Brownlow, there is a fruitful tension between scholarship and poetry; too often divorced, these activities are not for him mutually exclusive. This book asserts the autonomy of the literary imagination.

His aim is to be, as in Whitman's great line, "aplomb in the midst of irrational things." In a wide-ranging journey through time and space, the scholar takes note of significant historical detail, while the poet extends his range of sensation: he eats an explosive peach in Sicily; finds the inventor of the English sonnet in an English castle; lectures on the Irish writers' love of France in Voltaire's village, Ferney-Voltaire; counts great poets in Cambridge; finds Zen in John Clare; evokes the ghost of Shakespeare in rural Lancashire; remembers musical performances and readings of poetry that tuned his inner ear; walks the cliff path at Howth where Yeats had courted Maud Gonne; and finds community in classrooms while imparting this eclectic sense of taste."--Jacket.