This poetry collection presents a patchy record of an almost hundred-
year-long life as it was lived until Covid 19 came into view. There
is no mention of World War 2, which I lived through mainly as an
evacuee and wrote about only in letters, and there is no mention of
Covid in the poems, only one of which was written later than 2018.
But, reading through what I have written over the years, I can almost
catch a sense of the pandemic waiting in the wings. The growing
experience of crowding everywhere, the mass production methods
of stock rearing, the human crowding out of wildlife, plant and
animal, and the prospect cheerily propounded by extreme technology
of emigration to another planet when depletion and pollution will
have rendered this one uninhabitable - all this was making for an
unhealthy state of things. At the same time, I am not one to underrate
the many benefits we enjoy from our advanced technology, as well
for some of the changes it has brought to our way of living as for the
enlargement of our understanding both of the world we live in and of
what may be beyond. But the first function of poetry is to entertain,
and I hope there are poems here that will do that.
