I am pleased and relieved to be able to introduce my collected poems, under the title Diamond Wedding. Pleased, because it means at least one other person is as crazy as I am; relieved, because this collection spans a lifetime and that’s a long time to hold your breath.

I didn’t intend it to take so long, because I was earmarked to be a star poet at the age of five. I considered myself a paid poet when at nine years old I received ten shillings for six stanzas entitled Champion’s Return. As adulthood dawned, though, life got in the way of poetry: education and work and marriage and kids and more work and a divorce and a loving marriage once again.

It is hard to be a prolific poet when you aren’t lovelorn, bereaved or drunk, but nonetheless poems emerged, sporadically, in the requisite egotistical spells between necessities. Who lives long enough will accumulate enough works to be collectable. Over sixty years, my life has of its own accord threaded this collection onto the single strand of a story.  

I consider my gems diamonds, but you may differ: after all, critics (of neither ability nor repute) have dismissed them in the past. Whether kindly or spitefully they told me that intelligible poetry was suspect. It was rejected for using realism to handle romance, and for exploring emotions not fuelled by angst or chemicals. Finally, however, they damned it as linguistically elitist: using words and structures, rhythms and rhymes that danced across the page. To claim the modern name of poetry,  it was implied that the content should be illogical, unpunctuated and badly spelt, self-destructive and uncouth. Its shape could be novel but it absolutely must be clumsy; abstractions and platitudes must spew out only as stuttering, amputated prose.

It seems that my success is to have outlived such fashions. I am very grateful to Jackdaw Poetry who have published this collection and by doing so declared that ordinary life can inform meaningful word-craft; that we do not have to insult our language, nor torture it into incomprehensible shapes, to create poetry that reflects true emotions. They are putting their money where their collective mouths are.
I believe that poetry can be royal without being exclusive, and vivid without being crude. If the magic of words does not touch your heart, my apologies: either your life, or mine, has been sadly ill-spent; it is not for me to say which.