‘I have read individual poems to a number of people who say they have enjoyed them – I am sure you will too! Some are romantic, some funny; there are also poems of the present and the past.
‘I hope the illustrations that accompany some of the poems help to deepen what the poem is trying to convey to the reader: the combination of words and pictures will give you a sense of enjoyment and of involvement in the poems themselves. In lots of cases, you will be able to immerse yourself in the adventure of the poem, recalling things that in the past you have seen or heard of. All of this will add to your enjoyment of the book.
‘To give you a little more insight as to how the whole saga of the poems began, let me take you back to 1945 when I was stationed on the Burmese border. Having little to do after the day’s events gave all of us lots of time to think about: home, our friends and the family. So it was only natural that to occupy some of those hours my thoughts looked elsewhere. I always remembered that poem by William Wordsworth I learnt as a boy, “I wandered lonely as a cloud” – you remember it? Most of us do, anyway. As it passed through my thoughts, I thought to myself, “Why don’t you write some poetry?”
‘I thought about it a lot, mulling it over in my mind, but decided that this was not perhaps the time. In the end, the thought came back to me from time to time, over the years: “Should I?”
‘Well, as you can see, it finally did happen, after all those years. So never say never.’
Raymond Hunt