Follow the changing seasons through all their wealth of growth and flowering, through autumn’s fall, the withering of winter and all the challenging varieties of weather that can accompany these changes. These poems, written over a period of 30 years, are essentially poems of celebration: of immersion in the seasonal round that ‘resonate with quiet joy’ as one reviewer observed. ‘To walk through its pages is to be touched and refreshed by the dew...’ To encounter ‘widths of sky, or mercurial, brimming weather.’ The author’s companionable sensibility brings us a welcome breathing space at a helpful distance from the overly ironic or overly cerebral poetry to be found, too often, in literary journals. A blithe purity ushers through it. And, as in its Midsummer Garden it extends a joyful invitation to re-enter that purity ‘like...a winged seed.’
David taught on VSO in Sri Lanka and in a variety of educational settings. He also worked with homeless people in London before finding his way into twenty years’ work in Steiner education. Two Collections for children stem from this period and ‘A Treasury of Trees’, (2017) and ‘A Treasury of Plants’, (2020) for adults, (all published by Wynstones Press). 2020 also saw the publication of ‘Common Wealth’ (Matador), a panoramic collection of poems spanning prehistoric times to the present. ‘A Seasons’ Treasury’ comprises three privately printed collections here brought together for the first time and recording living through the seasons in rural Dorset and Herefordshire.