My poems about love actually started with one written years ago about love of life, and what life meant to me. My mother said it was a very good poem and one of my friends said it was the loveliest thing she had ever read!
Over the years it expanded in a strange way and I found that what I was writing about was all imagined. The poem about loving one’s children when I do not have any, the poem written as a fortieth wedding anniversary present when I have never been married and know nothing about how love mutates as we grow older, from personal experience. In fact all the poems in the book are written to women I have never actually met.
Jonathan Coudrille asked if any of the poems contained anything to do with dreams and when I explained to him how they were written he was fascinated. Jonathan is going to do the black and white photography for the book. People who read them do not believe that I have not had the experience of waiting for a lover to open her eyes and turn her towards me, or seen an empty unmade bed and thought it useless without a lover in it. But that is the nature of sensuous invention.
I met with Jonathan on Saturday 1st May. My first book of poems will be published later this year.