Preludes are primarily autobiographical poems written in old age. Their principal 'ground' is the south of England, and especially the area between the New Forest and the Solent, where Jeremy Hooker was brought up. They are, therefore, 'poems of place', and direct or oblique expressions of the making of a poet. Some deal with raw experience, but the aim in all is what Hooker (after Henry Vaughan) calls 'quickness' - not a narrow 'self-expression', but the transpersonal reality of the livingness of being in place.