One Breath at a Time

This little firstling began its life long before 2015, when it was published. It is a distillation of experience, and it went through much revision before arriving at its current manifestation. For me, poetry can only come from experience, and putting such personal experience into the public domain for the first time was a nightmarish prospect - rather like the recurring dream of walking down the street and not realising you are half naked until someone points out you left your pants at home. What I found interesting was the number of people who have come back to me and said "this touched me very deeply". That surprised me. When I write poetry, I don't think of how it will affect other people - only about how best to get onto paper what is inside me. It's a very egocentric thing, writing like this. But exposing it to the heat of public scrutiny is a very good thing - only by trying a knife in the fire can we know its mettle.

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