Susan Blanshard inhabits the sensual universe as comfortably and elegantly as if it were a second skin. This booklength prose memoir is a journey of narrative, language and emotion into a realm of significant love relationships. The reader follows the Poet and the Artist, the slopes of these bodies, in houses in New Zealand, the countryside of England, a village in South West France, an artists studio in the Fine Arts University in Hanoi, and a 1920's villa in the Old French Quarter of Hanoi—and finally acknowledges that, yes, our experience with enduring love, is part of the divine. Blanshard's prose-memoir embraces passion, remembrance, healing songs of bitter tenderness in the same room, or powerful imageries of visceral pain and tenderness are put together with feeling and intelligence. Alive with life and the possibilities of surfaces, and what lies underneath them, Blanshard's poetic prose comes out in original, sensitive, beautiful tones and words.