Category Archives
Uncategorized
Without Fear or Favour
Words & Emotions flow through each other and land on the page. Raw and Ragged.
This is a collection of poems examining the tricks of the mind, imagination and what is in front of you. Calm and conflict collide, while nature runs its course. Then there are my observations, my truth and questions, always questions. The words within, that tumbled out of my mind over many years have been grouped together as a work called ‘Without Fear or Favour.’ This all about the impact of life on words; which is why this work, which is ragged round the edges, has left me.
When I was 22 [1976] in Ireland, my first visit to Baltovin in County Kerry in the West of Ireland, I sat on an old stone wall outside the family farm. I remember looking across the fields to the distant Atlantic, and as the wheat rustled in the wind beneath a blazing Sun, I thought I can travel everywhere from here and never need to move. Sitting here where l do, writing, it strikes me as l look across a busy road that my mind is the window to everything, and if I search long enough I will see what I need to, if I have long enough. So, I was right all those years ago and have wasted a lot of time travelling in the wrong direction, not all of it, but most of-it! Journeys are uniquely our own and unfinished as this work is, if I ever dedicate anything, it will be to Micky upon whose beach my shipwreck landed. It was Micky who released me and my words. How does poetry emerge. From within of course, it comes from mood and experience or memory, coupled with observation of everything around you. Hope and Fear are there too, lurking, silent influencers, potent and fearsome in equal measures. It might be that these poems have always been there like eggs waiting to be hatched. So ‘within’ is the word I return to. This work is not contrived or revised. The words emerged as I thought of something or someone, or about an experience I had or one I was about to.
