Roger Nash gained international acclaim for his title story "The Camera and the Cobra," which won the PEN/O.Henry Prize Story Award, and was anthologized by Anchor Books (PEN/O.Henry Prize Stories 2009) as one of the twenty best short stories published in North America. Nash's short stories explore a theme less familiar in literature but common in life: how the course of our own day-to-day lives can be deeply ambiguous, a sheer mystery to us. He explores the tragedy and humour of this, over a rich variety of lives and situations, sometimes realistically leaving the mystery and loose-ends of life teasingly unresolved for both his characters and readers. He shows how the phrase "mystery writing" can be richly and revealingly extended beyond its more usual application to crimes and their solution, to the weave of everyday life.

This book attempts to solve the yet unsolved mystery: what are the intuitive rules of versification followed by poets and readers in writing and reading poetry? It performs a small Copernican Revolution, shifting the constraints from verse structure to the reader's «Rhythmic Competence». It confers a psychological meaning upon the phrase «rhythmical performance», that allows us to make predictions concerning the rhythmical performance of a metrically complex line. The theoretical discussions are supported by empirical research, in which readings by leading British actors and colleagues from the academy are submitted to an instrumental investigation.