Uncollected Poems

(originally ‘Recent Poems’)

Except for my micro-epic "Aldeburgh Dawn", all of the poems in this section have been written and published since my collection Nefertiti in the Flak Tower came out in the UK in 2012. (Publication in the USA is scheduled for late 2013.) Most of them are already ear-marked for yet another collection, which doesn't have a title yet, but which I hope I will be still around to see published. I have been quite ill for three years now but have found that when I have any energy and clarity of mind at all, poetry has been my first means of signalling how I feel. I don’t quite know what this says about how deep the instinct must lie to express oneself in verse. Maybe the whole impulse is just a reaction to the kaleidoscope of medication, with all those pills of different shapes and colours.

[ Archive Editor's note: More appropriately, I have now renamed this section “Uncollected Poems” — the ones which hadn’t made it into collections by the time of Clive’s death. Some late verse did: since he prepared the above introduction, 'Aldeburgh Dawn' and others formerly listed here have been published in print form in either Sentenced to Life or Injury Time. Accordingly I have transferred those to the appropriate sections, and added a few more late poems here; see the listing at left — SJB, 2021 ]