This work was first published in one volume—a hefty tome to be, truthful, one that could hold down a stack of papers in a Category One hurricane. Carrying it in one hand demanded you counterbalance a weight in the other, no doubt about it.

Problem solved. Voilá! Not one overweight volume but now split into two volumes, and Volume II now in your hands, and also including two essays I’ve recently written.

As said in Author’s Note Volume I, a number of these poems are like Hitchcock maguffins (my spelling) —devices upon which the plot swings but are not themselves core to the mood or impact of the story or tale. The stolen money in Psycho, for example, or the letters of transit in Casablanca, or the Maltese falcon actually in The Maltese Falcon.

Recently on television is Downton Abbey, itself a maguffin, and especially so The Force in Star Wars upon which or within which or because of which characters do change big time and develop, but The Force itself essentially never changes—the greatest maguffin of all time.

A number of these poems are just that, maguffins, and are so marked and explained as if they were written by characters in my two ongoing sagas, and thus affect the flow of events around the characters of those sagas. Incidentally, I hope to have the first volume of each saga itself come out a bit later this year.