Six years after Michael, I Thought You Were Dead, Michael Fitzsimons continues to be surprised by being alive and the way ordinary of things are extraordinary because he's still here to see them. There's the intimate world of his hillside home with Rose overlooking Wellington Harbour, and the wider world where friends and whanau live, and miseries, as Suzanne Aubert said, 'ride behind us on horseback'. Everywhere Michael looks, life is both precious and precarious: a thrilling high-wire existence. Some of the best lines of High Wire are simply that - a handful of words on a page to mark something fleeting that will make a reader laugh or puzzle or wonder. You can't ask more of poetry than that.