Icarus Still Flies

This is a collection of poetry and studies which have there origins and nature in my love of writing and ideas. This devolution to writing and reading are essential to my being and, ironically, contributed to my entry into the psychiatric system n 1974 just before my 14 birthday but have sustained throughout. Books and ideas were both an early love and haven in a troubled family. Aged 12 I met an English teacher who introduced me to new poetry and then a radical lecturer and some of his students, we debated many concepts and writing generally; the relationship between writing and ideas. The increasing involvement with the crowd at the university made the fault lines at home particularly sharp. I lived in a bubble of revolutionaries, a few writers, a couple of artists and many people who had simply renounced a conventional way of life; it suited me. I went to live in an avant-garde squat in London and was introduced to ‘experimental art’ such as ‘happenings’. Poetry, radical ideas and everyday life simply merged into a dream. Within a year began a period of involvement with psychiatry which has continued to the present. I will never stopped reading, writing and discussing books and ideas with people.