Atkinson is a Cumbrian from Cleator Moor. He grew up outside Romantic, Wordsworthian Lakeland and its (as they seemed to him) genteel admirers. He has since acknowledged Wordsworth as not only a poet of nature, but a humanitarian radical who addressed fundemental issues through our experience of the landscape.

In this work Atkinson juxtaposes Wordsworthian daffodils with a commentary on the life of a strike-bound mining community. He cites (among other quotations) the poet's question to the leech-gatherer in his eponymous poem: 'How is it that you live, and what is it that you do?'