Once upon a season, long-gone and vaguely remembered, these poems awakened something creative in me. I wanted to write words like these too: free flowing but with refrains, as the words of songs, accessible but closer to the poet’s craft. And so I did.

Brian Patten’s ‘The Irrelevant Song’ is full of odes to love’s replete and transient moments, so keenly felt and wistful, like these:

‘I met her early in the evening
The cars were going home
I was twenty-four and dreaming…
When the street railings were burning.’

And: ‘I caught a train that passed the town where you lived…
One evening when the park was soaking
You hid beneath trees, and all around you dimmed itself
as if the earth were lit by gaslight.’

As if one of Patten’s park gates swung open before me, I entered then a world I’m still a part of some thirty-five years later, which took me from poetry to journalism, biography and novel writing.

I didn’t read all the poems in this collection at that time. I didn’t need to. Those I read chimed so well with my student mood that I was moved to begin. Thank you Mr Patten. Still lovely words… and a very relevant song.

---

From my first collection of poems
‘Little Pieces of Writing’ (1986).














I saw a photograph

I saw a photograph of you
in someone else’s album
I’d forgotten that it had ever
been taken
I thought about it for most of that day
and the following one
We were sat on a rock in Wales
We were both smiling
It was taken last August
yet it seemed like
both yesterday and ten years ago
Other people just flicked past it
I saw a photograph of you
in someone else’s album


Suburban Dog Woof

When twilight is descending
And daylight is retreating
When children pretend to be sleeping
Late on those long summer evenings
Above the houses
And the neon lights
In the alleys
And behind closed gates
Always in the distance
The suburban dog woof
Breaks the silence

By this writer: