Feathers in the Well

I hope you will enjoy “Feathers in the Well”. The title refers to a wisdom once shared with me: that to write poetry and then to publish with the thought of profit would be like dropping a feather down the well – and waiting for the splash.

I hope to prove that warning wrong.

My dream for this slim volume of mine is that many might read it and like it and want to read more. Not necessarily more of me, although that would be satisfying, but more of far better writers than I may be.

My dream is that people will look for the works of the great poets, generally of the past. Poets who wrote and who write with some sense of meter and rhyme and, above all, real meanings easily understood through poems that linger in heart and mind.

A brief glance at my library reveals Keats, Coleridge, Byron and Shelley, Wordsworth, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Service, Edgar Allan Poe, the Brownings and so many more to discover or enjoy again.

In our time the poets are just as likely to be songwriters such as Bob Dylan and the Beatles and especially Leonard Cohen. Our Nick Cave is in there, as are Cole Porter and all those others from Tin Pan Alley a while before who contributed to The Great American Songbook. Then there is the best of Nashville, Tennessee from the likes of Kris Kristofferson, Roger Miller and Mickey Newberry. Australian Bush Poetry carries true verse if you enjoy it.

These are hardly the works you will find on the literary pages or in the journals of the academic elite, where all too often I find simply senseless streams of consciousness, prose that is randomly divided into lines and splattered upon the page for the adulation of the awestruck few. Hear me: the emperor has no clothes!

These poems of mine, I hope, are for those who are sometimes confused by what passes for poetry today. Thus they may never read poetry. And that is a shame!

My poems are intended to appeal to real emotions, to be easily understood and hopefully to linger in heart and mind. They are from my heart. They are not for dreary academic analysis ... they are simply feathers.