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Amidst so many shifting certainties and different priorities, there are always, of course, the eternal themes such as love, parting, youth and age which poets over the centuries have portrayed. An example of this is my take on Seamus Heaney’s Blackberry Picking. Here, I draw on my own early childhood memories when my beloved father … Continue reading “5. Unchanging truths: growing up”

Blake’s wonderful poetic sequence, Songs of Innocence and Experience stands as a beautifully concise, thought-provoking and memorable way to show the intermingling of both human and natural beauty and brutality. His Lamb and Tyger are perhaps the most well-known examples of this. I used his simple quatrains to offer my take on these universal themes. … Continue reading “6. Unchanging truths: the two contrary states of the human soul”

As I near my eighth decade, I can no longer ignore the approaching reality of death. Ours is perhaps the first generation when the promise of a reunion in the after-life, which I believed in as a child, is not generally held. I used Coventry Patmore’s moving poem A Farewell to imagine my feelings at … Continue reading “7. Unchanging truths: parting”

I began writing my book Poems from Poems just before lockdown in 2020, so inevitably the strangeness and alarm of that time features in several of my poems. Here are a few examples: My take on Andrew Marvell’s incomparable To His Coy Mistress aims to show the frustration of the young man separated from his … Continue reading “8. Covid: young love”

Do you remember the time when meeting our nearest was permitted in the garden, but only at a safe distance? I took Tennyson’s love poem Come Into The Garden, Maud and used it to show a grandmother’s anguish at this impossible situation: “Come into the garden, my darling, my darling, For it is permitted at … Continue reading “9. Covid: other perspectives”