My love of poetry was always unrequited. As with all young boys, my English teachers forced me to memorize and recite unintelligible Shakespearean sonnets and turn bad blood into worse ink. For the next half-century, I never gave it a chance.

But at the age of 71, poetry came in search of me.

The theme of ‘senses’ made sense. As a physician and winemaker, I would try to turn exquisite impressions into exquisite expressions, solvents for the soul dipped in dyes of the heart.

There are 17 poems in this sense-ational collection, each with a different form, climbing higher on the sensory evolutionary ladder from the cranial nerves to the prefrontal cortex and beyond.

Writing them was like dropping a rose petal into an elevator shaft and waiting for the echo.

Read these short, jagged-edged lines as imaginary gardens of joy and pain and wonder, with a dash of dictionary.