"'As my title intends, ' Mr. Lowell writes, 'the poems in this book are written as one poem, jagged in pattern, but not a conglomeration or sequence of related material. It is not my diary, my confession, not a puritan's too literal pornographic honesty, glad to share private embarrassment, and triumph. The time is a summer, an autumn, a winter, a spring, another summer; here the poem ends, except for turned-back bits of fall and winter 1968 ... My plot rolls with the seasons. The separate poems and sections are opportunist and inspired by impulse. Accident threw up subjects, and the plot swallowed them -- famished for human chances.