'The gallery of presences on the cover of Back to Earthis both an invitation and a question raiser: whose are these faces and why have they been chosen? To enter the collection is to learn that each face is either well known to Tony, or a presence met briefly and powerfully enough to have left an imprint. Diamond, the one non-human face, is the tiger in the poem ‘Orphan in the Forest, Laos 2005’. (Introduction)