For this paperback edition the author has added more than twenty poems from his first collection, Morning Rain, originally published in 1988. The poems in North Street concern themselves with the space between "Turning Forty" and "Turning Fifty", between the assumption of maturity and the sightings of limits. Each poem resonates with a mesmerizing beauty, poignancy, and grace, and is preoccupied with the notion of an "otherwhere," a "world 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 recognition of aloneness and gratitude for "the gnawing, the knowing,/the being and being here" -- that the drama, the story of North Street, penetrating unfolds.