I wrote my first poem when I was six years old in 1945. It was about waking up early to hear the milkman’s horse come clopping up our street in north London’s suburban Edgware. My family were still fast asleep, so I felt I was somehow privileged to private information, ahead of the game. The most important thing for me then was that the entire process of writing a poem happened fast. I could think of a first line, make it rhyme with a second, and I was off, racing through the verse to reach the next.
Eighty years later, this process remains much the same. The first line of a poem arrives suddenly in my mind, hitting it like a runaway train. I stop whatever I am doing and reach for the nearest green pen and piece of paper like a demented creature in case I forget exactly what it was. Or I chant it to myself as if I were reciting the rosary, even once opening the door to an Amazon delivery man who assumed I was off my rocker and bolted for his van as if I were about to shoot him through the heart. The difference between then and now is that today I have hundreds of stories to tell, not of milkmen’s horses who seem to have been consumed by modern technology, but about the places and people I have loved – and who, and how, and exactly why.
I am lucky to have an astonishing memory, so remembering what I did or said over my now more than 86 years comes roaring back at me at the touch of a button or a raw nerve. The sharpness of recall never leaves me. REJOICING will probably be my best work yet, because today I am not afraid to reveal the tiny corners of truth and love that mark out my life in rivers of rhyming and shining words.
I adore the entire process, its demanding simplicity, and the swiftness of its completion. Writing my novels is an entirely different kettle of words, involving years of patient time, research, writing, rewriting, editing and anxiety. The freshness and vitality of writing a poem is for me like taking a blissfully hot shower and then stepping out into the dusty old world again feeling stronger and more resilient, ready to face its slings and arrows, and eager to fight back.
I continue to hope you will enjoy reading my poems as much as I love writing them.
June 2026, Woodstock, Oxfordshire
