As you can see from the notebook pages above, the poem published in this issue of the Notre Dame Review was originally called 'Anything to Declare'. It began life as a projected sequence of short poems about returning to England after a year away in Japan. These were all begun during July, and as the black date on the page shows, they were written out in a fair copy at the end of the first week in August 1998. They were separated by asterisks because I was hedging my bets about whether this was the poem, or whether there would be other pieces to include. I must have had other plans for it, because, added in pencil, you can see some projected section numbers in which the fourth is numbered '4', but the fifth is numbered '12'.

Whatever, at this point I stopped working on the sequence, and no other sections were drafted. Then, in October, James Lasdun came to Sendai and gave a reading of his work. I had known him slightly since the early 1980s, but we had only met twice before: at the wedding of a mutual friend, the poet Stephen Romer, in Cambridge, England, and briefly at the offices of Jonathan Cape. James had written an encouraging review of my first book, Overdrawn Account (1980), not long after graduating from Bristol University. He stayed in Sendai for two days and we spent many hours catching up on mutual friends and discussing contemporary poetry. What we have in common is that we are both permanently resident outside of the UK, and at the reading James included 'The Revenant' in his presentation. This, the title poem of his second collection called Woman Police Officer in Elevator (reviewed in NDR 4) in the States, is also about returning home, but it has rather a different feel to my draft poem, 'Anything to Declare', from the summer.

It was listening to his poem and discussing it with him later that sent me back to the draft of my own. I made the revisions in the red biro which turned it into a single poem of three verses. I altered the title, perhaps in the light of our conversations, since it was clear that I did have something slightly different to 'declare'. The dedication was added to the poem after I had typed up this revision and decided that the version seemed to work. By that point I was in e-mail contact with James and had sent him the poem, asking if he would allow it to be dedicated to him. 'Something to Declare' was selected for publication in the Notre Dame Review on its first submission anywhere, a rare occurance for me, and one that increases my affection for it - a poem that didn't come out as I planned it and, as a result, prompts in me all the more feelings of pleasure and gratitude.