'The seventh song' belongs to 'Groundwork', which will be included as a section in my twelfth book of poems, 'Adamah' (Enitharmon, 2001). For many years I have been preoccupied by 'poetry of place', which is the title of my book of essays published in 1982. The preoccupation began as a concern with the materiality of specific places, and with all the forces (historical, geological, cultural, social, ancestral, familial, personal) which 'make' places. The most succinct expression of this interest that I know is David Jones's 'One is trying to make a shape out of the very things of which one is oneself made'.

The emphasis of my poetry now is not different from this; only my exploration of 'ground' has deepened - in a way, I suppose I should say, it has become metaphysical, without losing its concern for the 'matter', or materials, of place. My reading of the Objectivists (especially George Oppen and Charles Reznikoff) in the 80s, and of Martin Buber, with his concept of 'between', was important to me in this respect. Also crucially important was the growth of my friendship with the sculptor Lee Grandjean, with whom I have collaborated on two books and an exhibition (called 'Groundwork'). Both of us are image-makers, working, through different arts, not only to make (and unmake) images, but also to explore their signifying power, at a time when the older iconographies are dead.

As a background to 'The seventh song', I should also say that I have become increasingly concerned with androgyny, in the primary sense of 'wholeness', and with attempting to escape the limitations of the confessional ego. In other words, I seek in my poems to explore the human ground, asking what, if anything, 'we' are part of. I hope these brief notes will be of interest to readers of the poem, though they are, of course, only a background: if my poem works, it is at least as much a surprise to me as to any other reader.