Hi there. 

Reading the profiles of all you poets,  I wonder if I am too old to hang out here - maybe there is an upper age limit!! Whatever it is, I guess at seventy-six I would have a problem getting past the doorman. I have two poems written when I was seventeen - can I qualify on that? Perhaps not - it is so long ago it must seem like an alien country. But I get on fine with my six grandchildren who are aged between eight and twenty-three (my poem 'Coming of Age' was written for the oldest one's twenty-first birthday). So perhaps there is hope for me yet!

For the last forty-eight years I have lived in Scotland, although I was born and grew up in Northern Ireland. In 1971 I became very emotionally involved with what was happening there (this was on the eve of the IRA bombing campaign). The symbolic poem 'The Valley' was an outlet for the frustration I felt - one of three I wrote at that time. I paid the price with my mental health and spent a short time in a mental hospital over there. Bipolar they said - I wonder.

My poetic output was scarcely prolific - five poems up to that time. And a further forty years were to lapse before I wrote anything else. I only started writing again in July 2012.  All my other poems to date were written in the following nine months - the first being the short poem 'The Bee'. The words of this came to my mind unbidden after a bee brushed my face and startled me. I suspect it was a subconscious reflection back to that pivotal time of my life in 1971. The subsequently written poem 'Sanctuary' is explicitly about that time*.

I hope you will read my poetry - if I haven't already bored you to tears with my potted history! (About a third of my poems are humorous to help lighten the mood). Readings of the poems are being added to my website.

August 2015

* The prose piece 'A Grey Day's Story' here and  in the 'Difficult Days' section of my website is even more explicit.