The vanished hour: Poems written over half a century

Proceeds from the sale of this book have been donated to Epilepsy Action in memory of our son, Craig. Over the years, I have written little more than two poems a year, on average. That includes my first, faltering attempts as a teenager, as well as poems written in middle - going on old - age, when the creative impulse has come in bursts, but in which I believe I have found my own voice. Whether I have, and whether that voice is worth listening to, is for others to judge – but the audience, up to the present, has been largely limited to family and friends, with a few exceptions in the case of one or two poems published in poetry magazines. Persuaded by Fyfe, our youngest son, to go ‘public’ through the online medium of a blog, I have posted some 45 poems accompanied by appropriate 'complementary' images. They remain there – at www.thevanishedhour.blogspot.com - and friends and family who have read them have been kind enough to comment on them in positive terms: “Some of the lines make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up”; “I love the poems! There’s some beautiful phrasing - “bicycle, boned and broken”, “waders unriveting the sand” - and the sense of time past and present is moving”; “They are written with integrity, clarity, without desperation to be read or artifice and yet they engage, gently, democratically”. The idea of finding images to accompany the poems was an echo – a sad echo – of the plan which Craig and I had – not long before his death from epilepsy in 1998 - to put together and publish a collection of my poems, with Craig providing the images. It was not to be. I will continue to write and post poems on the website, with pictures. But for this collection, the only picture is one of my own – taken one ice-cold weekend with Ann, Alastair and Craig in Abbey Park in Leicester more than forty years ago. It is monochrome, and perhaps a little sombre – and that may be an apt description of 'The Vanished Hour', but if there is a current that runs through my poetry, then it is the power beneath a sometimes frozen surface – the power of love. Nothing is more important.