VOYAGING THROUGH TIME

<p>This poetry collection presents a patchy record of an almost hundred-</p><p>year-long life as it was lived until Covid 19 came into view. There</p><p>is no mention of World War 2 which I lived through mainly as an</p><p>evacuee and wrote about only in letters and there is no mention of</p><p>Covid in the poems only one of which was written later than 2018.</p><p>But reading through what I have written over the years I can almost</p><p>catch a sense of the pandemic waiting in the wings. The growing</p><p>experience of crowding everywhere the mass production methods</p><p>of stock rearing the human crowding out of wildlife plant and</p><p>animal and the prospect cheerily propounded by extreme technology</p><p>of emigration to another planet when depletion and pollution will</p><p>have rendered this one uninhabitable - all this was making for an</p><p>unhealthy state of things. At the same time I am not one to underrate</p><p>the many benefits we enjoy from our advanced technology as well</p><p>for some of the changes it has brought to our way of living as for the</p><p>enlargement of our understanding both of the world we live in and of</p><p>what may be beyond. But the first function of poetry is to entertain</p><p>and I hope there are poems here that will do that.</p>