New Poetry Book release - Selected Poems Volume 1

 

After completing my 6^th poetry book ‘Haiku of Life’ which was 50 odd Haikus, each one talking about one memory of each year of my life if I am honest I reached somewhat of a cross roads with my poetry.

Excluding my split books with my wife Amanda (“The Snow was all we could see” and “Run away with me again in eight words”) my friend Nick Armbrister (“Europa 5 and Europa 6”) and the split book I wrote a series of Haikus for with the lovely Alta Mabin and Charles R Haffner (“Poems from the Rising Sun”) which have also being wrote in a different way from any of my solo poetry books,my solo books then went very quiet as my poetry seemed to slow down for the first time in close to forty years and after the creation of likely over 3500 poems!.

Yeah, over 3500 poems. It still staggers me how much poetry I had wrote and after re-reading them over the following few months it became apparent I needed to do a selected poems something that I could allow me to reflect over this long journey of the past 11 years of publishing my 6 full length poetry books for myself.

Over this process, it became apparent this shouldn’t be done just for me but rather the world to see also how my writing has developed over these 11 years from my earlier days with ‘Return to Kemptown’ to where everything really began to change with ‘The End of Summer’ and ‘The Birth of Autumn’ with the first two of my seasonal poetry books before I began to really strip back my works with the following 4 books ‘The Streets were all we could see’, ‘Underground Haiku’ and ‘Haiku of Life’.

Of course, it also made sense when sharing this books I had to share some previously uncollected works with the book that for one reason or the other didn’t make either of the six poetry books (or whatever is coming up next).

One of the pieces ‘From Winter to Winter’ – nearly for example became the finale piece for ‘The Birth of Autumn’ before Mark E Smith of the Fall sadly pissed as ‘Nothing’ almost featured in both ‘Return to Kemptown’ and then again in ‘The End of Summer’ before its unusual structure became apparent it didn’t fit in either book but deserved to be shown now not as failures which none of these 9 poems, just examples of the way my mind worked over various books and how my writing changed over 12 years.

The book can be found on Amazon UK links (here for Kindle and here for books)