Synopsis

The poet who reads in the books of the past takes from the language of the past, so I am contemporary with those I read. They are my dead friends, the ghosts of the past, not my contemporaries, who move on the page. Therefore I create the present environment on the page of the language I live in. So to the determent of T.S. Eliot I write in the present of the past which is near to me living.

Otherwise I would like to say to you, my Reader, that the best poem in this book is An Object Is Dark Because It Is An Object, despite its prosaic start. I would like to condemn myself, before you condemn me, for saying things I don't know - atoms and molecules in general minuscule, though whether one is more sizeable than the other I don't know. For the occasional formlessness in language. For not really understanding what Schopenhauer is all about.

I wrote these poems when I was twenty and in between that age. I am now fifty, and I still envy myself those years.

All I have said is particular to myself and the time I was writing in, and is not a general aesthetic for everybody else. I see poetry like a mountain, with the majority of poets being at the bottom. Therefore they are more read than the top, and they linger on in their influence.

Having taken a word or two from a different time does not condemn my language as sugary. It is the emotion behind the word that counts, and poetry is a wave of emotion curling words on top of it.

I am a Romantic and poetry is for me the gateway to the secrets of nature, usurped by science just recently - large claim, but our society is becoming more and more sterile, without that richness of fancy that is nature. The glory in the richness of the word. The belief that the voice of nature speaks through the poet, that the magic alchemy of fusion between two chemicals, as between two words, brings a third one to the fore, col

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