Rain Days

A sense of place is essential in writing and the British Isles has a huge diversity, not simply in its geography, but also in the people it welcomes. In the collection, time is represented in the division of the poems into the four seasons and all are underscored by memories of my father as local rainmaker. The poems or lacrymosa are a representation of social connection and just as my time in the United Arab Emirates was educational and inspirational in terms of composition, co-translation and recovery, the country's own links of animal husbandry to political statecraft surfaces once more in Rain Days. The cultural narration, explored in The Accidental Ethnographer, and The Resident remains a vital code for living, undiminished in the contemporary world in the view of poets. Let such memories of the past and of home continue to inspire and console those left behind, with shoes that can never properly be filled yet whose memory is lovingly cherished.