Secrets, Lies and Little Joys

Poetry is far more than it seems. Writing verse can provide a creative shorthand for working through dark thoughts, making sense of your emotions and behaviours, as well as those of others. Poetry offers a way to navigate the tangled maze of challenges, strife, and joys that constitute our inner worlds. It can also magnify life’s wonders, awe, and delight. These varied experiences – regret, mistakes, learning, stumbling, and persevering with bravery – all comprise a life fully lived. Writing poetry helps minimize the bad times and spotlight the good. Revisiting these poems allows for deeper reflection, enriching your life further. Secrets, Lies and Little Joys contains a sampling of my own poems and experiences, along with contextual commentary. In some cases, I provide explanation of the impetus behind the verse. It is my hope these poems find a shared recognition, a communal understanding that you are not alone, mad, or bad in your travels through life.

Richard Godfrey began his career as a scientist working with elite British sportspeople and is now an academic at a university in southeast England. He was born and brought up in the West of Scotland and began writing poetry in the late 1970s at the age of sixteen, in the hope of understanding the world, himself, finding meaning and of expressing himself in a positive and creative way. This proved to be a very useful outlet, alongside sport, exercise and music, in maintaining physical and mental health and in recovering from the many ‘challenges’ that are part of life.