Pluperfect, Collected Poems

Setting this up as a kindle available on Amazon proved beyond me. Never mind. I had gone far enough with compiling the Word doument by the time I found that out that I wasn't going to abandon it at that late stage.

The next best alternative was to make a pdf out of it. That was easy in the end but not until I'd explored all the difficult options. Good Lord, I thought, if I'd wanted to battle with the computer all morning, making an easy job too hard, I need not have retired.

But now we have it, at least in version 1.0. One can't go on looking for errata and gremlins forever and so let's go with this.

In the end I decided to go without a foreword. The poems can manage without any more than the barest commentary, context and footnotes.

But the foreword I removed, if you really want to know, was thus,

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I had thought the Collected  might be pared down to only 20 or 30 poems but that would have been a new Selected. Thus the 123 poems here represent the career retrospective from, I think, 1979, to 2021. They are pluperfect by having looked back once, they are looked back on again.

Some poems were luckier than others on either side of the fine line between being kept in and being left out. In the unlikely event of a Complete Poems, there would be no such arbitrary line.

The process of writing was, for me, one of unlearning or of learning what not to do and, preferably, not consciously dwelling on such thoughts about what one was doing. The more successful pieces seemed to be those that came without trying too hard, that arrived almost fully-formed, and the three original manuscripts in the appendix show very little amendment.

123 poems is a slight Collected but it was never a full-time job. Four poems a year was the rate I maintained fairly steadily, much of that time not knowing where the next poem was coming from or if it would come at all.

While it is customary to thank people who helped or read such work along the way it became increasingly the case that if I was happy with a poem, that was all that mattered. Any reaction they generated by appearing in print or being read was of interest but a bonus. It was very soon not a commercial venture but something with which to please oneself. However, of course, by presenting those that might be more worth preserving, I’m glad of anyone who wants to share them and I hope they find something worthwhile among them.  

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You are welcome to the pdf and can have it for the asking by e-mailing dg217.888@ntlworld.com.