Thank you, everyone. I am unreasonably excited by this.
It is a certainty that the book would never have been written without Eratosphere, which in 2001 introduced me to a community of serious poets, virtually the first such community I had known since my university days. Though my literary predilections are not exactly those that lie behind the founding of the Sphere, the presence here at that time of writers like Alicia Stallings, David Mason and Bob Mezey – and indirectly of Anthony Hecht and Richard Wilbur – was a great stimulus. The book, once written, would never have been published if Timothy Murphy, on a visit to the UK in 2002, had not by chance introduced me to Phil Hoy, managing editor of The Waywiser Press, which led in 2003 to the publication of my first collection, Jigsaw. And since then I have seen Little Blue Man appear, with Susan de Sola’s delightful photographs! (The poem “Little Blue Man” is not included in my new Waywiser book.) Given that it took me a decade to write Already the Flames, this may well be my last book, too. (Sighs of relief all round...)
Clive
PS for Michael: The cover image is indeed by Paul Klee. It is a watercolour on linen dated 1916 and entitled Gestirne über bösen Häusern (Stars above evil houses). I am grateful to Mr. and Mrs. Werner Merzbacher of Zürich for permission to use it. It was proposed by Phil Hoy, who owns a copy of the image. This was very astute of him, for I had not realized how many houses – good, bad, longed-for, abandoned, haunted, threatened and so forth – the book contains: it’s a kind of running theme. (There are several others.)
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