John Horrocks spent much of his childhood at his grandparents' house at Rotorua. His poems recall the lake at this time - when the water was clear and many of the surrounding hills were covered in bush - and the town itself, with the spa in the Government Gardens in its final years. John is a research co-ordinator in the School of Health Sciences at the Wellington Institute of Technology. His previous volume of poems, Raw Places (2006) was based on his experiences as a farmer in the Tararua foothills.