During hectic years as a teacher and translator the writing of these poems provided a welcome retreat into the imagination for William Radice; hence the book’s title, which is also the title of its central section. The word also has poignant personal associations for the poet, ‘The Retreat’ being the name of the Cambridge house of his friend Juan mascara, the brilliant translator of the Penguin classics editions of the Bhagavad Gita, Upanishads and Dhammapada. Radice has edited mascara;s aphorisms and uses one of them as the epigraph to this collection. Readers of Radice’s earlier books-his collections of verse as well as his translations from Bengali-will welcome this substantial addition to this oeuvre. Written in the for of a verse diary the short, forthright, neatly-crafted pieces in this collection mark an interesting new development in the poet’s career.