Rae Desmond Jones' poetry specialises in precisely observed social and political phenomena. People and their often anti-social impulses, as acted out in tension with their social context, give his poetry the power to unsettle and disturb, while maintaining the comic aspects of his subject's humanity. In A Caterpillar on a Leaf, this gifted narrative poet turns away from explicit narrative and adopts the ghazal form in order to contemplate the deeper intuitive and psychological bases of literary and scientific meaning.