Songs of My Life and Death

The poetry in this book is formal: unlike modern "free" verse it rhymes and it scans. (If rhyme and scansion was good enough for Shakespeare and Spenser then it is good enough for the present author.) A great many of the verses here have been prompted by the bravely borne mental and physical suffering and uncomplaining stoicism of the writer's beloved Dina as she died little more than twelve months following diagnosis of a particularly aggressive form of motor neurone disease. Her illness and death have generated many unhappy poems on these pages and these have, in their turn, prompted verses on the pathos of our human condition, eschatological and theological questions, about animal pain and animal cruelty, dystopia, contrition, unrequited love, loneliness, self-doubt, about warfare on the battlegrounds of Gallipoli and the Somme (at both of which my grandfather fought), martyrdom, hell and the apocalypse. Much of the poetry is cathartic. Much of it, too, is pitying for her only now that she is gone from me because Dina spared no pity for herself in her dying and asked for it of nobody else. The book is not unrelieved grief however. There is nonsense verse to be found here too. Among the many Shakespearean and Petrarchan sonnets and several series of quatrains there are limericks and clerihews, one poem inexplicably shaped like a rugby ball, and they cover the subjects of dodos and penguins, Labrador retrievers and cocker spaniels, toads, elephants and sea-snakes, bishops and delinquents. There are poems covering travels on all seven continents from Japan and China to New Zealand and Antarctica, Nepal and Peru, from Spitsbergen and Bear Island in the high Arctic, and from some of the loneliest specks of land around the northern Scottish coasts, to the crowds of Trafalgar Square and New York, to Tanzania, Egypt and Morocco. There are verses here about the great and famous, the good and not-so-good; Michelangelo and Dali, Turner and Millais, Mary, Queen of Scots and Henry VIII, Sir Thomas More, Handel and Jimi Hendrix, Scott of the Antarctic, Aeschylus and Kant, Empedocles, Nietzsche, Keats, Dickens and Trollope.