Honour Roll

I honour with my poems those who got me writing: the heroes of the renaissance, those small press giants of the Sixties and the Seventies, still working when, in the blighted years of Thatcher, I picked up my pen. They’re semi-lost now under the pile of garbage that buries most history of worth and meaning. Chris Torrance; Bill Wyatt, modest haiku master; Brenda Williams and Barry Tebb, both were kind; Dave Cunliffe – ‘old decrepit’ – whose small press mags were a pleasure just to look at, let alone to read. Some were acknowledged in their life, most weren’t, except by a diminishing group of peers.

I honour every name, and many more besides. Their words still dazzle on the fading pages of torn magazines in dusty bookshop boxes, or letters from a dead hand I proudly kept, stored in the cupboard with my towels and bedsheets waiting for the next renaissance to find them.