Digitalis and Other Poems

This collection brings together a series of individual poems, which for the most part are not closely connected, and ‘Massiah’, a sequence of verse narratives told in a Guyanese barber shop, where there is continuity from one to the next. Some of the individual poems were written in response to invitations for submissions on particular subjects. These include three on war and peace and five short pieces written during the time of the pandemic, but the remainder are more scattered in theme, tone and form. The spark for most of these came, uninvited and unsolicited, into my mind, demanding to be developed into a finished piece for dissemination on page or screen. However, when I began to gather these poems together for this volume, I became aware of two recurring concerns. (John Thieme)