Someone recently told me I was a 'public poet'. My poems are accessible; they aren't literary or philosophical or surreal or about language. They're not 'magical' like Naruda's. In a way they're not personal. They work best in performance. I wish sometimes I could write like Wallace Stevens or W.S. Merwin or John Ashbery - poets that you can read and read again, finding new levels of meaning each time. That's not my way. So be it. I like writing poems in which I become a voice for another person or something from nature. 'Persona' poems. Technically I mostly write in free verse, sometimes using rhyme for endings, and always with a sense of the iambic rhythm. Some of my poems are dramatic monologs - I like Robert B rowning, and know most of Eliot's 'Prufrock' by heart.

There are poets whose language has become part of me, simply because they've been around in my life for a long time. Shakespeare - particularly since I've played Oberon and Macbeth; Dylan Thomas, who enlivened thesound of poetry for me years ago; T.S Eliot, whose 'Four Quartets' I once read to audiences in an English chapel, and Hopkins. I enjoy Rilke, Milosz, Les Murray('Translations from the Natural World'), Merwin, Mary Oliver, Ted Hughes, William Stafford, Pablo Neruda, Simon Armitage, Marvin Bell, Auden, Phillip Larkin, Akhmatova, Galway Kinnell, Jorie Graham, and Yeats. To name but a few. This website represents different kinds of poems- Riddles, Nature, Children's, and Generic. It also includes short stories, samples of my nature photography, and articles. Currently I'm working on a collection of poems about redwood trees, and a CD of nature poems set to music.

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