Publisher's Synopsis
The Street Vol II This book is the second volume of poems written, in sonnet form, by David Pearce, as he was facing terminal cancer. Having completed Vol I of The Street, which was published in 2016, it was very surprising that David managed to produce further sonnets, sufficient to fill Vol II, as his health rapidly deteriorated; he died on the 11th November 2016, without being able to see his final works published as a tangible book. The title of the two volumes derives from the name, the Street, of a natural narrow promontory of shingle, shell and pudding-stone extending a mile or so into the sea off the coastal town of Whitstable in the county of Kent where David was born. The Street is completely covered at high tide, with rising waters encroaching from both sides. One should be careful not to be cut off. 'The Street' is in itself a metaphor because the author is being cut off. The subjects of the poems are diverse, sometimes treating us to the beauty of nature, or David's recollections of friends and family, sometimes hinting at the final steps that he must take. How would any one of us deal with the finality of impending death? In the Foreword to this volume the Canadian poet Professor Richard Greene, alerts us to David's use of what was not just a labour of love, but something much more: "....in this second volume...David Pearce contends with the unanswerable fact of his own imminent demise." Although this sense of mortality was certainly there in Volume I we cannot avoid its overt impact as we thumb through the poems in Volume II. We see phrases such as: "And whispered farewell to Life's love affair..."; "...how will it be for me....as now I rise to go."; "The bookmark left to mark the place for good, .." David Pearce was born in Whitstable in 1938. That Kentish coastline was, in the early war years, under threat; and for a while, as a small child, he was an evacuee in Cornwall. After school at St Edmund's, Canterbury, and then at Oxford University, he taught at Stanbridge Earls, Hampshire, and then, for thirty-three years at Berkhamsted School where he was Head of English and a boarding housemaster. He was a joint-founder of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust, and, through that, rejoiced in friends all round the world. The importance of his family life and other interests may be deduced from the poems.
