"Most poets, even the most linguistically eclectic, mine the riches of relatively local deposits of language and commune directly with relatively restricted communities. Herrick began writing beyond the boundaries of Europe and the Western world when he left the United States in 1975 to teach at universities in Libya and Palestine and, beginning in 1981, in Japan, where he has since lived. From the early 1990s he has been writing verse under the horizon of the global internet, where the entire world has begun to learn to live, for better and for worse. So he writes out of his personal engagement with a world whose "center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere", as Medieval theologians liked to describe God. Here are the results of his epic quest for a glimpse of all, or "sum.""--