Like many authors, I began by writing poetry ... and still do, occasionally, though without a view to publication. A recent, on-going project, purely for personal enjoyment, is My Very Own Book of Personal Saints - poems on 'secular saints' I particularly admire (mainly artists, writers, composers, etc). One of my favourite saints is the Modernist composer Eric Satie.

'Satie'

Side-stepping smartly with a

sly smile sliding

to the right

to the left, hop

one - two - three.

Any little music in the form of a pear

leaves me loving

leaves me dancing

with a smile on my mind.

Jack-in-a-box joy-boy

with your feet on the starlight,

Socrates in sequins

with some subtle sarabandes.

Making Piccadilly

sound as French as a lycee

where your lambent Gynopedies

wink the history of a sigh.

Meditative monkey

with a vision of Medusa -

snip - snip

clip - clip

(elegy for snakes).

Sad clown

priest of the poor

beautiful excentrique,

angora ox

bright angel-ape

my dreamy, dreamy fish. 

I have a particular affection for 'The Change' (written when I was still at school) because it was my first poem to be accepted for publication  - in Poesie Europe. Coming across it again recently it was strange to note that it contains, in miniature, some of the principal subjects and tendencies in my later prose writing (particularly in my first novel, Zade, though also elsewhere) - a love of European culture and of Paris in particular, a fondness for incorporating quotation, and a loathing of the joylessness, monlogic heaviness and self-regarding cruelty of all forms of fascism.

The Change

          In Paris, Verlaine, I saw your soul

          at aperitif hour on a terraced cafe

          your fingers fiddling with a miniature roundabout

          enchantedly twirling the painted horses

          humming under a lilac-lipped smile:

                Tournez, tournez, bons cheveaux de bois,

                    Tournez cent tours, tournez mille tours,

                    Tournez souvent et tournez toujours,

                    Tournez, tournez au son des hautbois.

           Then the bead-eyed waited came

         and the painted horses slowed and slowed -

                    Tournez -

                                  Tournez -

         And there was left the broken roundabout

          and the forced joy of the blind street-player.

* * *

From time to time I might add a few more poems I don't mind other people reading ...