Have just sent off the corrected manuscript and added in a few more pictures and the final, I hope, version of the Reading On section. As this is at its heart a personal memoir, rather than a scholarly work, I didn’t want to have footnotes or a full bibliography, but obviously some people will want to read more, and if I can get people to look at his poetry again, that would be good. For instance:

This unimportant morning

Something goes singing where

The capes turn over on their sides

And the warm Adriatic rides

Her blue and sun washing

At the edge of the world and its brilliant cliffs.

The view from the window of the White House

and ends:

And now lightly to kiss all whom sleep

Stitched up–and wake, my darling, wake.

The impatient Boatman has been waiting

Under the house, his long oars folded up

Like wings in waiting on the darkling lake.

He wrote that just after the war. I love the idea of an ‘unimportant morning’, which somehow has the importance of every morning of one’s life. I can’t say I always understand what he is saying, but the best of his writing resonates at a place which is impossible to define – as someone said, poetry is for saying what cannot be said in prose.