Publisher's Synopsis
This book is primarily a gift for each of my grandchildren. I hope that through it they will gain an understanding of who I am at the deepest levels of my thought and emotions, something that will help them to interpret what they already know about me. The five sections of the book – Boyhood, Nature, Life and Love, Music, Faith – encompass events and experiences that have, during the course of an ordinary life, dominated, influenced or enriched my experience. My working life as a Methodist Minister, the struggle to believe, attempts to live a Christian life, as well as a natural curiosity and interest in people and the stuff of experience, have combined to nurture a reflective personality concerned with the meaning and significance of ordinary experience. For me, life is a quest to see the beyond in the midst, where the struggle to see truth, even if only glimpsed unsatisfactorily (as it usually is) is seen to be infinitely worthwhile and opens on to a surprising joy, which, for me, has its origins in God, the ground of our existence. The poems, secular and sacred, are therefore essentially about the discovery or disclosure of something other than that which is earthbound among us, though God opens the doors of our perception to him through the common stuff of human experience. Thus they include themes such as: awe, longing, simplicity, ultimate significance, catastrophe, the joy of human encounter, confession, the almost unbelievable blessings of life to be found in a wholehearted openness to life in all its ordinary richness.
