This book serves as an introduction to Michael Carolan's poetic voice: an insight into a mind uniquely able to capture the sensual, which delights in the every day, and yet can draw out a hidden profundity from the mundane, the abstract from the concrete. This is the voice of a poem who can see in the curve of a woman's back and the taste of her lips the whispers of art, yet also in the eyes of a dog, the streets of New York, and in musings on the way his life, and the life of others, have come to pass. This is Mike's voice, his world expressed 17 syllables at a time. Mike and I have known each other for several years now. He started off as my student, and now he's my friend. Throughout this time, I've watched as he's refined his talent as an artist. As a poet who works so frequently in the mode of the haiku, Mike has had to learn to capture the almost ineffable subtlety of the form, the intangible precision of thought an idea that balances the haiku upon on the pin point of its harmony. He has achieved this by finding in that delicate tension the perfect placement for his ideas, the captured moments of his inspiration. Whether this inspiration is found in a certain cleverness that captures an amusing twist to every day life, an inherent sense for or an almost raw eroticism that resurrects the lusty rush of past ecstasies, or in a reflection that recalls the same natural beauty which he witnessed, the haiku has become Mike's own. Yet let's also not also forget that the work as a whole also has its own form, something of his creation. Not a mere aggregate, there is something harmonious and rhythmic in the collection and its divisions. 151 individual meditations become something more when brought together, yet never lose their own particularity apart from the whole. That's Mike's work, his originality. The best way to experience Mike's voice is to hear it for yourself: to let it speak to you as you read. With that, I've said all I need to say: it is that voice that yo