Bedside Days

A collection which begins with a description of a man's slow (indeed apparently endless) decline may suggest that Bedside Days offers a bleak outlook on life. However by the end of the sixty poems in this book readers should have sampled all aspects of the human condition: its sadness and foibles certainly but also its capacity for creating beauty and doing good. Overall the writer has sought to give the collection a positive even optimistic tone. War and dystopian futures are present but humour is never too far away. Whether they refer to actors struggling to play corpses a soldier confronted by a painting of a battle he had taken part in the noise of a distant train through a window a man who once aced a pre-war tennis champion or to the exultant incomparable pleasures of love the poems are first and foremost intended to be enjoyed.