Writing with a multilayered perspective from the Midwest and middle class at middle age, Richard Terrill portrays the landscape and people of northern Wisconsin, where he was raised, and of southern Minnesota, where he has lived and worked more recently for a dozen years. Here, too, are references to far-off China and Korea, where the poet has also resided, and to his experiences at home with his Chinese wife and family. But music is at the center of Coming Late to Rachmaninoff, and Terrill's first collection of poems proves he has an eye for the ironic and the beautiful, an ear for music and the music of our language, and a curiosity about the ways daily experience confounds our most well-meaning gestures and surprises of expectations. -- Cover.