The Grand Tour: a Steamer Trunk of Travel Poems

A cautionary word before takeoff. Dear fellow traveler: Those of you who set out with me on this versified Grand Tour with expectations of a comforting consistency of: time frame, travel style and point of view, lengths of stay in any given country (not to mention organized schedules and depth of exploration there), will quickly realize that they simply do not exist. This could, I realize, lead to varying degrees of disappointment (if not mild trauma) giving rise to the hasty notion of a last-minute cancellation of the entire trip and cashing in your round-trip ticket. Before doing anything so rash, however, dear Perry's and Burton's of the new millenium, please let me chat with you a moment about the care and feeding of these poems and how they managed to be collected under one rooftree, as it were. There is, admittedly, a kind of Cook's Tour feeling about the book, in that a whale of a lot of ground is covered in a 'hedge- hopping' manner spanning a brief period of hurry-up stops here, lingering stays there, and with Accommodations and Comfort ranging from 'shoestring el cheapo' to desert and jungle 'posh.' At first glance, the itinerary seems to be one continuous voyage touching both well-worn Middle School Geography sites and exotic unheard-of 'ports of call' around the world in a prescribed period of time. This appearance is deceptive. Our voyage is actually made up of poems written in various times and climes stretching from 1951 to the present and representing a canvas of nearly half a century. And it is arranged in geographical rather than in chronological sequence. Thus, those knapsack-burdened, Youth- Hostelling, barn-hopping, auto-stopping trips of one's youth have become inextricably entangled with later, more civilized, 'package tours.' Back trouble, a carpal-tunneled right thumb (critical when hitching south -except in Britain and what's left of the Colonies), and age-increased dependence on hotel amenities have rendered that earlier mode of travel, reg