These are poems filled with emotion … of trying to grasp the meanings of our past … of knowing the people and the places around us. My childhood, from the age of five, was in Cornwall, England: in many ways idyllic, but often when returning there to visit, I would find it difficult to truly re-connect with that earlier life … and the people it embraced....

The initial thoughts, a long time ago now, were scribbled, with pen on paper, lots of deletions and change, before the final form was committed to a small A5 booklet. For about 30 years I did it this way, forming a compendium of one hundred poems, some of which, looking back, I am now more pleased with than others.

Trains are such exceptional travel vessels. Planes are exciting, but you are crammed together like British sunseekers on Brighton beach, and apart from the adrenalin rush of takeoff and landing, all you see out of the tiny window resembles ants in the desert. Buses admittedly do run on the ground and can offer delightful views, but again jampacked and fighting for elbow room, while the vista of traffic jams or other vehicles can be extraordinarily boring. Trains by comparison ....

It could be said that we are all politicians to some degree, as we negotiate our ways through life, but it is those who take it on board as their profession that can sometimes be the most intriguing. For better or for worse they have set themselves up as ducks in the fairground, dodging rubber bullets

Four poems that reach out to encompass diverse dimensions, beginning with Whittling our Niche (perhaps my own favourite, and the poem which heads the WoN website). This poem explores the notion that during his or her short life any person sees a miniscule portion of the universe which surrounds. Our friends and experiences come from that tiny splinter taken from a massive tree. But what if we could connect to the greater trunk and all its branches?

I came to love the beaches of Kangaroo Island: sundrenched in summer, wind-blown in winter; the ‘Autumn break’ months of April and May somewhere in between. But whichever month, the magnificent stretches of sand that circle the island are pretty much deserted most of the time. Emu Bay on the North Coast was a special favourite, while the Antarctic-facing Vivonne Bay - a peaceful haven in Summer - could project a turbulent scene through the winter months....

I have a love-hate relationship with digital. My age I guess, but also a craving for the natural world and for people to talk to each other, rather than screens. At the same time, I have spent much of the past twenty years tapping away on keyboards, so perhaps it’s one rule for me, one rule for them. But I still enjoy the simmering-under-the-surface mentality of the verses in this section.

One of my regrets in life has been that I have spent too much time away from Italy. After a fleeting visit during teenage years, it took a decade to arrange a revisit, then almost another two before I got back there again. It was not until third time lucky that I got hooked, invigorated to return … again and again. This love for the place fostered a lust to write about it too.

Australia was the birthplace of my poetry. On the spur, I decided to put thoughts into verse, beginning close to home in South Australia, before moving further afield. From the starting point I tried as much as possible, to vary the style and form of the poem, so that each reflected the subject, while being presented in its own unique manner.

Family and friends, Part 2, is a wider ranging set of poems compared to Part 1, because it strays way beyond the family fold and confronts more diverse emotions, including loving, but unrequited relationships and the untimely death of a best friend. But we begin with a poem that recalls the start of a long-lasting love affair.

Exploring the games that torment our minds! A phenomenon that has occurred for me - and it is assumed a multitude of others, across cultures and countries - I first realized was happening during a work visit to India in 1999 (more detail on this can be found in the chapter: Indian Revelations). During those early morning hours before waking, words, phrases, sentences, tumble down from above, in some sort of half-formed, logical sequence .....

We begin with two poems which recount special moments in England, my country of birth, before moving to faraway lands, where each explores a topic derived from its own special locale. The uniqueness of this chapter of poems is formed from different happenings, in a variety of places.

Two poems in this section are dated fourteen years apart, but reflect a connected theme related to Kenyan society. The first, written from the eye of an itinerant worker does address themes of wealth and poverty, in a practical sense, but it is the second poem - penned after living in the country for ten years - which confronts the nub of the problem: greed!

Right from the start India had an enormous impact on my thinking, perhaps because I was there for study and so able to discover more of the inside story: to appreciate what made things tick. After that, work visits followed, building something similar on foundations already laid.

Four of these compositions express a profound love and respect for close family, while the odd one out (’How would you feel’), reflects something akin to the opposite: a dislike for the situation I found myself in. These are special poems, full of feeling, penned on the spur and motivated by those inner most thoughts that all of us are prone to encounter from time to time.