Three sequences of verse come together in this poetry collection that ranges in tone from meditative to satirical. The title sequence imagines the 14th-century French poet Fran�ois Villon stranded in the isolated and semideserted coal-mining town of Millerton; another vividly evokes the mysteries of the Indian rope trick; and the final one turns its focus on Samuel Marsden, the 19th-century missionary whose character is intriguingly contradictory.