In the Eye of the Storm

"In the Eye of the Storm" is a collection of verse in three sections, from "Demeter's Dance", where aspects of nature are sometimes threatened by neglect or interference and "Breakages" - emotional responses to love and life, to poems prompted by Greece in "Moonbirds and Wild Water." They are hopefully impressions and thoughts of more than merely personal relevance."In the Eye of the Storm" is a collection of verse in three sections. "Demeter's Dance" conveys mysterious or disquieting aspects of nature. In the poem "To Marcus by the Corn", the past one can feel locked beneath the earth of a Suffolk field, seems, momentarily, to uncannily possess the boy walking through the field with the poet.Demeter was the guardian goddess of the land which she let wither while searching for Persephone, her daughter, abducted by Hades and carried to the Underworld. The poem "Demeter" recalls her as a ghost, still wandering the fields and waiting to return. And in "Moon Hare" there is a recollection of the folk belief that a girl left by her lover turned into a white hare!In the section "Breakages", the experience of loss and regret is rife in such poems as "The Dream", conveying the unreachable, in "In Retrospect", comparing a lost love to "dark music in reluctant depths without expression", while turmoil and compassion surface in "The Final Piece", where the element that would complete a person's character, has gone astray.Youthful pessimism persists in "Drowned", bemoaning the loss of our universal soul and "The Butterflies" have but a fleeting beauty.The collection "Moonbirds and Wild Water" is inspired by Greece and her islands - from the birds that sang all night in Skiathos and thoughts on Santorini's volcano, to verse about Crete where I live - from the resilience of her mountain folk to the myth of the Minotaur in the Knossos labyrinth.