The Flash of Weathercocks

 The Flash of Weathercocks: New and Collected Poems is a collection with a difference. Old meets new in The Flash of Weathercocks; an anthology comprising poems that have been previously printed as well as some that are unseen, arranged in fifteen thematic sections, containing landscape poems, portraits of people, love poems, satires, humorous poems, personal memories, etc. In a wide variety of styles, forms and moods, they were written by a man in middle life, and reflect the changes in contemporary beliefs and the tension between society as it was in the mid-twentieth century and the social habits and presuppositions experienced at the end of it. Taken as a whole, the collection reveals an interplay of contrasting responses to the frustrations, hazards and delights of human existence, each poem qualifying others in a manner that by implication converts monolithic attitudes into complementary relativities – a function of poetry that can, in Samuel Johnson’s phrase, enable responsive readers ‘the better to enjoy life and the better to endure it’. The Flash of Weathercocks intends to do just that.