Flying Backwards

I wrote the poems in Flying Backwards at intervals throughout my life to help me remember and understand those "spots of time" by which, according to Wordsworth, "our minds / Are nourished and invisibly repaired." Only when I became an octogenarian did I see that they told a story. It's a story that has taken me from Kansas City to the Berkshire Hills to the Big Apple-by way of the Panama Canal. - Herbert Knapp