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Note on Waitoma Cave.

I have more than one style.  Who thinks he’s one person has missed the point.  I’ve always been fond of insects, since my schooldays when a maths teacher, Gus Gates, took a group of us rambling over Hampshire so we could discover that there was more to life than the Technical School and our backstreet homes.  Waitoma Cave is in New Zealand, which I’ve never visited, though my daughter Undine went to live there soon after this poem was written and I now have more of a feeling for the place.

The glow-worms here owe everything to a book in Hendon Library.  The last line is half-remembered from Montale’s Giorno e notte (Day and Night): e si destano i chiostri e gli ospedali / a un lacerìo di trombe... (and the cloisters and hospitals awaken / at a laceration of trumpets...).  I was translating this at the time.

Alan Marshfield

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