ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Many of these poems were first tried out in Sheffield at readings for The Broomhill Festival or Writers in the Bath, and I thank those audiences. Two appeared on the Manchester Writing School’s online project WRITE where we are NOW. Three were printed in PN Review 254. ‘Thanks to Basho’ was published on The Bow-Wow Shop. The versions of Japanese jisei were made with the help of Keizo Shimizu and printed with my commentary in BMJ Palliative & Supportive Care (February 2017). The ‘Two Songs from a Mock-Pastoral Interlude’ are extracted from my libretto for David Blake’s opera The Plumber’s Gift. Under the 2020 virus lockdown, I published and commented on a few of these poems for The Broomhill Festival at http://www. broomhill-festival.org.uk/john-birtwhistle and read one for Derby Museum & Art Gallery at https://www.derbymuseumsfromhome. com/activities/poetry-in-lockdown. The paintings by Jules Breton and Stephen Farthing are in the Graves Gallery, Sheffield, and Joseph Wright’s portrait of John Whitehurst is in the Derby Museum & Art Gallery. These can all be found on the Art UK web catalogue. A paradigm of the ‘crouching’ type of Venus (or Aphrodite) is a Roman copy of one by Doidalsas of Bithynia, in the Vatican. As always, I am grateful for the genial criticism of Alan Brownjohn, Jack Donovan, Michael Glover, Hugh Haughton, Trevor Stacey, Tim Webb and my family. 87