A Japanese girl waits for her lover, a disgraced samurai, to return; Rasputin, near death, finally gets the joke; a poor rich girl lives her life as a ghost; a rebel leaves hearth and home to find spiritual truth. These and other individuals are set against vast backgrounds of colonial greed, galactic empires and internecine wars, in tales spanning continents, worlds and centuries. All this in six chapters of verse. Poetry still rules!