"The forty poems in North Street are concerned with the space between "Turning Forty" and "Turning Fifty," between the assumption of maturity and the sighting of its limits. All are preoccupied in one way or another with the notion of an "otherwhere," a "world I don't believe in" in which the "water of memory" is washed by "the water of forgetfulness," and the "touch of forgiveness" allows "a guilty man" to "go free." It is between these poles - between "original desire" and conditional freedom, between the recognition of aloneness and gratitude for "the gnawing, the knowing,/the being and being here" - that the drama, the story of North Street, unfolds."--BOOK JACKET.