As the title implies, Armitage's flesh-and-blood account of numerous personal journeys reads like a private encyclopaedia of emotion and health. Vivid and passionate, the poems range from the rain forests of South America to the deserts of Western Australia, but are set against that ultimate and most intimate of all landscapes, the human body. Equaliy, the body politic comes into question, through subtle enquiries into Englishness in all its guises.