The first edition of The Painting Stick, gathering poems written in 1991–2002, was published by Peter Robinson’s Pine Wave Press in Sendai, Japan, in 2005. A few of the poems have been revised for this expanded edition, which also includes eleven previously uncollected poems written during the same period. The book begins with a series of prose pieces, which are followed by poems with various European (especially Italian and Greek) settings, poems about the artists Joseph Beuys and Alfred Wallis, and a tribute to the seventeenth-century author John Aubrey – together making for a collection grounded in place, in language and in history.