A trade unionist conceives a grand poem which will encompass his whole life, since World War II. Soon he finds he must include his grandfather in 1915, his mother in Hobart in 1935, his father in Egypt with the Air Force, George Orwell in Spain, a German pilgrim, some French resisters shot in 1944, Soviet sailors drowned in a sub, Cole Porter, Venice, Bob Dylan, Hans Holbein, Anne of Cleves, Trotsky and Tsar Nicholas II.

His daughters will be in there, and his wives, and his work. There will be politics, dreams, elections, paintings, mountains, funerals, vineyards, folk music. He cannot evade his implication in dispossession and oppression. Amazing how many things go to make the close-woven fabric of a life.

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There is this urge to speak:

My mother climbed Mount Wellington to catch the dawn; she needed us to see with her that first godly wash of rose, faint on the far-flung Derwent and the eastern shore; to see her world spread out before her at her wet-shod feet.

She needed us to know there was a world before us, that there was a her; and I share her need to tell it all …

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