This is Ernest Yates’s fourteenth volume of poems, and the eleventh volume in an ongoing series based on his wanderings through Philadelphia streets.

In this volume the poet’s morning walk along one of Philadelphia’s main thoroughfares introduces a realm “beyond belief,” as the volume’s first poem announces. Then in poem after poem the secular city provides ground and counterpoint to the poet’s variable meditations, as the city’s impersonality drives the poet to contemplate such human values as love, beauty, freedom, justice. In the end the poet moves on, bearing away all vain musings; it is the city―in its varied, raw physicality―that abides.