Poetry Mine
Inspirations
School reared me on the Romantic Poets - Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Coleridge and others found in the pages of Palgrave's Golden Treasury. Milton, T.S. Eliot and Matthew Arnold led the way into the Sixth Form, taught by teachers who instilled a love of poetry that has never left me. Over the years I have opened the pages of R.S. Thomas, Frost, Edward Thomas, Heaney, the war poets especially Keith Douglas and Isaac Rosenberg, Betjeman and others. I enjoyed the Birmingham readings of the Liverpool Poets and was proud to stumble on Welsh poets Alan Lewis, who tragically died in the last month of the Second World War, and the young Owen Sheers born near Abergavenny now living in London. In the forefront of women poets I have read and enjoy is Gillian Clarke (National Poet for Wales 2008) whose Collected Poems inspired many ideas for my own writing.It was on a family caravan holiday in rural Shropshire I wrote my first poem. It may have been the warm summer sun or the ghost of Housman. But I believe those lost poetry schooldays bubbling away like hidden lava, rose to the surface and slowly spread their influence over the ensuing years.
Reading other people’s poems, workshops, poetry group memberships, poetry courses and visits to places, have kick started ideas, many of which evolved into the poems you find in Poetry Mine.