(As well as being available as both a paperback or a Kindle on the various Amazon sites, Barnes & Noble, etc, the book and e-book can also be ordered directly from my publisher: https://booklocker.com/books/13392. You can also read a sample selection of the poems on either website.)

I wrote all of the 128 poems in this book in a fit of mad creativity in 2023/4, (that’s roughly a poem every three or four days). They’re all short – no more than one page. A lot of them rhyme, but I’m a big believer in making the structure of the poem fit the content, not the other way around.

The content varies, but perhaps the best way to describe their overall flavour might be to call them Romantic, since they’re often about the themes of traditional Romanticism: nature, madness, love, nostalgia, childhood, memory, loss, melancholia, dreams, the supernatural, beauty. Many have a philosophical tone.

About a fifth of the poems are ekphrastic: that is, they are reactions to other works of art, especially paintings and songs. For example, there are poems based on paintings by Van Gogh, Matisse, Velasquez, Hopper, (among many others), and songs by Nico, the Beach Boys, Neu and Popol Vuh (again among others).

Since I’m 70 and many of the poems are fairly traditional in style, they might appeal most to fellow Boomers. There’s lots of stuff about getting old, looking back at one’s life, and preparing to face death. And if that doesn’t put you off buying them, nothing will.

As well as the poems, my book also has two other sections featuring short stories and essays.

The eight short stories follow the modern trend of being really short by past standards and edging towards flash fiction at generally around 1000 words.

The eleven essays are about Art with a capital A (predominantly painting and poetry), exploring the following range of topics in terms of their relationship to Art: authenticity, materiality, the canon, success and failure, rhyme, originality, ekphrasis, science, logic, beauty, and mystification.