I am a child of the fifties, born in Liverpool, where my early education took place. It was during these formative years that a love of poetry first took root and was later firmly established while attending boarding school in Hampshire.

My first love had always been sport, from football to cricket, from athletics to tennis, while poetry seemed a subject reserved for the more studious types!

My conversion was probably due to the enthusiasm of one of my teachers at primary school who introduced a poetry reading competition and I chose to recite a few verses from ‘Horatius’ by Thomas Babington Macaulay. The idea that poetry allowed me to compete drew me into the scheme of things and I became a willing convert during my early school, and later college years.

Thirty-five years, and a lifetime later, I returned to search the poetry of my youth. But poetry had changed and modern contemporary verse seemed the order of the day. This neither inspired nor enticed me.

I believe poetry should be classical in the main and disciplined by rhyme and meter, where for me contemporary verse, however excellent, will even be prose. And so it was I began to take the first tentative steps of the poet, and however badly my peers may judge me, for mine own self, I am again inspired and enticed, both to read and to write.

The one constant in my life is my Christian faith and I pray it is this same faith that moulds, not only my soul, but also the words I aspire to write. As a young boy once read in the lines of ‘Horatius’:

‘For how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds
For the ashes of his father
And the temples of his Gods’.