A Personal History of Vision expands on the concerns of Fischer's acclaimed first collection Paths of Flight and embodies what Judith Beveridge has described as his 'seemingly effortless ability to blend visual detail and imaginative vision.' Intertwining the personal and the historical, the modern and the primeval, culture and nature, these poems explore vision in its many senses, often with reference to the visual arts. At their heart is a search for an enlarged awareness of ourselves and the world, in which the visible and the invisible, nature and spirit find one another. At the same time these poems are awake to inadequacies and the trials of death and suffering--personal, political, and ecological. Yet, even in the darkness (the focus of the second section) they detect possibilities of transformation.