What is memory? A mystery, surely. Memory reveals. These three poems are sustained and nourished by personal memories. The poems are not strictly speaking autobiographical, but they are oriented by memories of a lifeβmine.
And who am I? I am a committed Christian, a man who, at the age of 29, was found floundering in the midst of life and then pulled out of the mud by Jesus Christ. These poems are my story, obliquely rendered. Imagination feeds on memory; indeed, thought itselfβthe conceptual dimension of consciousnessβwhich we sometimes think of as a kind of abstract operation of the faculty of reason, feeds on memory too, with the difference that its inventions are pressed through a fine-meshed sieve, whereas the imagination flies up through the roof of the kitchen where the sieve is being manipulated, and tracks the heavens.
My life is displayed indirectly, within imaginary frameworks. Memory ranges across the panoply of time, and what it finds in the past is as much shaped by the present and by future expectations as by events that happened once.
These three poems were written separately over many years, with no attempt to link them. While the material is linked to personal experience, the range of the poems is universal.
It cannot be abstracted from my life or my art without losing sight of my identity. My beliefs are essentially part of me, not add-ons, so it would be quite impossible for me to make sense of my life or to write poetry without expressing them, indirectly or directly. The post-modern climate in which we live affirms in principle the validity of this assertion and licenses my endeavour; it favours the particular, even though, perversely, it tends to be ill-disposed towards the particularity that is Christian faith and towards poetry that openly expresses that faith.
