This collection draws on what Donald Davie has discerned as Jeremy Hooker's presiding territory: 'the emotion that we have when we recognise some particular terrain as 'home'. Davie suggests that 'it is hard to think of a better, a more humane or more timely end for poetry to aim at'. Written during his time as Creative Writing Fellow at Winchester School of Art, the collection takes the ancient capital of England with its jumbled historical multiplicity as a setting for a sequence which moves through self-discovery and the pain of broken marriage to a fulfilled delight at the processes of art - the anonymous painter of the title - and religious faith. "Master of the Leaping Figures" is a unified whole, a major work which justifies Dick Davis' description of Jeremy Hooker as 'one of the best of our poets'.