An autobiography is a life encapsulated in words, and poetry is the distilled wisdom of any language. These are structured poems in the traditional sonnet style, ten syllables a line, fourteen lines. The iambic pentameter and rhyme structure is sacrificed for the metaphor, so the ultra purist would not call them sonnets in the strictest meaning. The poems try to capture moments in a lifetime and are meant simply to be a record in words of my own fleeting experiences. An autobiography in prose would not be able to do much more. They cover an interval of about a quarter of a century, but the memories within them go back much further. They are our own shared memories.