My first recollections of poetry date from my primary school years, when we read Walter de la Mare's The Scarecrow in class.
"The north wind powders me with snow, And blows me black again"
is an image that has never left me.
A few years later, at the grammar school, we were required to compose our own poems, and I still remember the subjects of my first attempts. One was about Drake defeating the Spanish Armada, another a shameless filching of T S Eliot's Macavity - but endowing my pet rabbit (rather than a cat) with roguish and mysterious human qualities.
Soon we were studying poetry in more depth and I particularly recall being fascinated by The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, even attempting to learn great chunks of it by heart.
Favourite poets gathered during my school years, included Housman and Hardy, and I also developed a life-long addiction to Shakespeare.
Far from being put off by the plays I had to study in depth, they became, and remain, particular favourites - Julius Caesar, Othello, Henry IV.
I started writing seriously in my early 20s, the first poems constituting an "end of the affair" sequence.
Perhaps, like the copying of Macavity, it was an attempt to emulate Hardy and the poems he wrote following the loss of his first wife.
I still have that first collection, and I still like to add to it and tinker with it. I also enjoy writing parodies and burlesques, humorous poems, and poems which appeal to the emotions. It has been a source of great pleasure and one I can hardly imagine being without.
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