Back to Life

The idea of things coming back to life runs through all three sections of this collection. The first section explores the contemporary world of the pandemic lockdown period through interpretations of experiences, many of them limited to photographs and video, others stimulated by reading. The section ends with the return to life of the neighbourhood. The second section is a further exploration of neighbourhood, with poems which bring back to life people and places, known and lesser known, from the Greenwich area where the poet lives. Some are only street names, others, names lost and often hard to recover. The poems seek to locate different aspects of life in one place, and to make more sense of belonging to that place by a willed recovery of its past. The final section brings together poems written during the author's decade-and-a-half spent in Greece, bringing back aspects of this past life, with its personal, political and historical themes.