These poems were written over a period of 45 years, beginning in the 1960s as an undergraduate at the University of Colorado, and most recently just a few months ago. When people discover that I like to write poetry they usually begin by asking the awkward question, “What do you write about?”

I normally suppress the desire to say, “Everything,” because that's not very helpful. I usually reply that I write about the same things that all writers do: love and death. That is all there is, and there's always plenty of both to go around.

And when they ask the embarrassing question of whether all of this really happened to me, I recall the wisdom of one of my favorite mentors, who said, “The 'I' in the poem is not you, but it's someone who knows a lot about you.”

I’m letting the “I” in these poems speak for me.

—Jerry Higley