These poems cover over forty years. Writing them is like collecting the
bubbles which stream away from the stern of a small boat crossing a vast
ocean. They are all different. They are all the same. Fragile,
inconsequential bubbles of livingness. The subject matter ranges from
Oxford, its colleges and ghosts, to the Far East with its temples, its
hunger for life (and cncrete jungles), and its two and a half thousand
year old Buddhism. Here, Theravada monks still proclaim, in the Buddha's
own language, that "all things are suffering, all things are
impermanent, all things are not self. Nibbana is the Highest Happiness."
Here is the teeming multiplicity of life and the utter freedom and
stillness of the Unconditioned State which runs like a cack through the
universe. Through this crack beings escape from the burden of becoming.
Through it they return again. From one lifetime to the next. From one
moment to the next.