Collected Poems

This is an eclectic selection of poetry written over a period of around fifty years. Most of it is reflective - on life, love and loneliness, major themes of our existence here on Earth. Or the poet's existence anyway. Some of it is just funny. Some of the pieces are certainly venomous, showing a deep dislike of some of life's more irritating habits and tribes. There are various poetic forms here - some free verse and some lyrical, what you might respectively call 'low grade T. S. Eliot' and 'junior' Betjeman. There is also a fair amount of pure 'Pam Ayres' and would not look out of place on a 'Hallmark' greetings card. There are also some examples of show-off 'technical' poetic forms (including abercrandian, haiku, nonet) written as challenges to the poet's wordsmithing abilities, rather like completing a crossword or Sudoku puzzle. Some poems were written as, or became songs, humbly attempting, to follow in the huge footprints of US singer-songwriters like Paul Simon, Bob Dylan and Tom Waits and the UK's Richard Hawley. Too much explanation of poetry and poetic forms is not what poetry is about. Poems are not there to be dissected, explained, interpreted and generally torn apart for a reader, as if in preparation for an examination. Poetry is there to tell a story, describe or evoke an emotion, make a point - yes; but the impact for the reader as an individual is his or her own connection with the poem or the poet. There is also the strong possibility that the poet himself (or herself) didn't understand, or didn't want to understand, the words that had appeared on the page. This is where poetry scores over conventional 'noun-verb-object' sentence construction, the usual but necessary building blocks of writing and story-telling. In poetry, there are no rules, no conventions (unless you want them), no guidelines, no required plot development - just words and, wondrous beauty, a blank sheet of paper (or its modern, computer-driven equivalent). Some poetry does require, or is enriched by, a lyrical, symmetrical beat to it, as in humorous or venomous poems. In these types of poems, repetitive meter and rhyme add to the enjoyment of reading them and because they flow and feel more comfortable, the better for a more structured form. There are many examples of this in the collection. Some of the collection could be described as pithy, as in the poem 'Loneliness', with four short lines capturing a myriad of thoughts, an untold (but for the reader, imagined) story, a scene clearly painted in the mind - where could this be: a street, a bar, a railway platform viewed from a carriage window with a journey undertaken? The beauty of this short poem is that it opens a window to the reader's imagination without leading the reader through a neatly plotted story viz. loneliness is a statewhere all the time I crynot just for mebut all the strangers passing byIf any there is any passing resemblance to an aspirational autobiography here, the analogy that comes to mind is that of a jumble of jigsaw pieces lying in their box - with the lid missing and hence no clue to the picture. If life is a jigsaw, or at least the personal emotional attributes that comprise a person's inner being are, the pieces (poems) have been sorted into 'sky, sea, faces, trees, greenery ....... ' (adjectivally inscribed emotions like lonely, philosophical, venomous ......). A lot of the 'characters' in the collection are purely fictional. Angeline ('only drowning men can see her') features a lot as does Michael Alexander Caruso ('MAC to his friends ... a very funny man'), Captain Sensible ('its time to go home') and many others, both male and female. Enjoy!