In rhymed, metered lines and traditional forms, including twenty-six sonnets, and in prose excerpts from his memoir, Dan Burt exposes roots, education, culture and passion under the cosh of history and chance. These poems reveal, examine and judge the brutal, corrosive worlds of butchers, hit men, mobsters and offshore charter captains. They display the greed, lies, corruption, arrogance and narcissism behind the lawyers, businessmen, politicians and generals the author met throughout his time in the US, Europe and the Middle East. But they also counterpoint this dystopia with the redemptive power of the sea, art, learning and women, alive and dead, whose presences course just below the skin of a now-old man walking to his Cambridge college set.