Poems

I like reading poetry. Mostly I like comic verse but I do enjoy reading the acceptable forms of poetry and the experimental or different forms. I read Milton and Shakespeare at university as well as the modern poets. I read Chaucer and gradually began to understand it. I read Beowulf and didn't until I saw a translation.

I began to appreciate the poetry of ballads, the choruses of songs, songs themselves and suddenly it clicked. The ancients called many poems, songs and that was how I began to understand the flow of connected words and images.

From Haiku to Psalm, Pop songs to Nursery Rhymes and Limericks and Doggerel and the short advertising phrases there is the satisfaction of flow. The repetition in the old tales told and remembered for centuries that eventually become the written word all have their place in my understanding.

On these pages I explore my thoughts and ideas.

To begin with I introduce two books: The Turval and the Grobble an epic poem with simple illustrations and The Kowhai and Me, a collection of my poems.

The Kowhai and Me - a collection of poems (£5.95 from the Author)

The Kowhai and Me is a collection of poems that explores my thoughts and ideas, not as a disinterested observer but as one who is not afraid to express what I feel, or explore ideas that randomly pop in to my mind. Sometimes the results take me by surprise, and sometimes I read one of my poems thinking, “Cripes! Did I write that?”  Such thoughts take me back to when I wrote them and remember the mood and the time.However, there is something for everyone, a variety of poetic forms and subjects, romance, observation and comments embracing long poems and a narrative poem in dramatic style. 

I would like to say I was influenced by some of the great English poets, but in reality although there is a little of Milton, some of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and at times Marianne Moore, much of my work has its origin in that legacy of poetry we were 

fortunately exposed to as young and bored school pupils. Since those days I have learned to appreciate poetry and its evocative imagery. 

The Turval and the Grobble - an epic poem (Available from Amazon) 

The poem describes the hunting of the terrible Grobble monster that set free in pity by the Do-Gooders of outer Greenwald lays waste to the Duke of Greenwald's domain. The Grotty Prince DeVoid is sent to subdue the beast accompanied by his good squire The Turval. 

Driven on by love or lust after the Lady Loralee the Prince suffers trials and tribulations in his quest, although not half as much as his Squire, and finally more or less overcomes the foe. Well, at least he gets the girl. 

This is a comic poem inspired by the works of Lewis Carroll and a touch of Spike Milligan, plus the devious thing between my ears.