Certain moments, hardly noticed at the time, can in retrospect seem to have had direct designs upon the future, opening up perspectives, emotional and physical, into a new space. Remembering how I began to write this book, at the back of my mind is a field of dry grass and orange-yellow Californian poppies on the…

In 1968, my second year at university, I read two or three books (two of them poetry) that influenced my thinking and writing for at least two decades. Whether the influences have worn off I don`t know; maybe they never do. I go back to the actual texts quite rarely. I go back to the…