By October 1966, Graves’s relationship with Aemilia Laraçuen had ended. While recovering in a London hospital ward from a gall bladder operation, he wrote to his friend Ralph Jacobs that while he did not want a new focus (read a ‘Muse’), he admitted
‘as you can guess, dozens of women are waiting to pounce on me when I am disengaged.’
Seventeen year old ballet school student Julia (Juli) Simons entered the ward, and on her second visit said to Graves:
‘I have fallen in love with you’.
Graves was caught, and in what was a ‘constructive alliance’, she would be his longest-serving Muse.
Many of the poems in this limited, signed edition are written for Juli.