Simon P Walker

Simon writes, "You could not call me a prolific poet. Poetic words come to me only sporadically. The exercise of writing a poem is of course a discipline in language; one of my own preoccupations is with how we use language. I am conscious of an erosion of the texture of our cultural vocabulary these days. The inevitable consquence of this is a coarsening of both our thought and our action. We lose the poetic at our peril for it is, as T.S.Eliot put it, the act of 'purifying the dialect of the tribe'.

Attempting to write poetry seems to me, as much as anything therefore, to be a task of renewal- self, linguistic and cultural. Inchoate forms and meanings, which hook our deepest fears and desires, can only be reached for through symbol and metaphor. As such, poetry has the capacity to the most truthful and honest of all acts of speech.

There is also therefore, something of the primitive, or childlike, about the task of poetry; it seems to me to be about retrieval of things which somehow we have lost along the way- be they personal or social things. At its best poetry puts us back in touch with what it is to be human- fully human. It draws us closer back toward home."