Below, in no special order, are some of the themes in the nature of things with short quotations.

Pariah.  Muddle.  Death.
  A junk-fest behind the library!
  Cassettes, clothes, curtains, huddle in trays.
  Wasps buzz bananas, the air drizzles.
  A dosser dies, a girl aged fifteen.
                               ––Death in the Morning, v.1

War.  Pain.  Displacement.
  Born as a refugee
  from fire and bayonet,
  my mouth a cellar of smoke,
  my father’s worst fear yet,
                                       ––Balkan Sacrifice, v.1

Oddness. Stillness. Industry.
 Across the land, reclaimed, a telescope
 makes out, this side, sheep.  Across the river
 no common magnifying picks a shape
 of any creature, although one gathers
 there must be shifts, and crews inside those ships.
                                                       ––Depot, v.3

Senses.  Instance.  Rules.
 I’ll not forget
 you two hours old,
 all of us quitting the birth ward.
    Not a nurse
    in the night-wide corridor,
    all of us lumbered.    …
 I’ll not forget
 your smell of now,
 our promise bundle.    …
 we were disobeying the rules!
                   ––Your Smell of Now, vv.1,2,6,8

Females.  Wit.  Longing.
 Where are the girls of yesteryear
 Who rang me round from ear to ear?
 Where Moll Flanders, the clever dear,
 where Griselda’s uninjured air,
 where Florence (her swabs were regular),
 Nell Gwyn, soft-centred Marjorie,
 M. Curie and Eva Braun, oh where?
 You rode the footlights, caused a stir.
        What happens to electricity?
                                                ––Envoi, v.2

Childhood.  Love.  Perception.
  Stunned by his own created world,
  the babe’s surprise is justified;
  and so (her arm about him curled)
  is her unfazed, seraphic pride.
            ––Grandmother and Child, v.3

Time.  Judgment.  Decay.
 But years will change, new colours will seep in:
 the earth look dull as grout.
 The sun will seem to smoke like paraffin.
 Umpires will jerk about.
 The roof will creak, no one know what we’ve been;
 and soon we’re really out.
                                   ––Prepared, v.5

Corporeality.  Values.  Angst.
 The sun-moon reflection is
 a solid column, a pine log.  The pine
 the totem of this high-class household
 of incoherent anguish.
                               ––Edvard Munch, v.6

Knowledge.  Nature.  Successors.
All knowledge is carnal, no cause lasts
sixty years, a sealed wine dries.  Nature,
they say your beauty is in my mind.
Come the next City they will dispense
with us entirely, both.
                              ––An Age Turns, ll.5–9

Water.  Mourning.  Apocalypse.
 These half-lights may soon be over
 the sky is at last allowing its purple
 to glare on the horizon
 sails go by
 lick the wind make smacking noises
 an earth-light howls in the grass
 there have been many victims
 a dinghy chained by its nets
 the town in the marshes is fading into itself
 nobody is there any more
 in the far sky a yellow bird
 is freeing its cry
 the boats are all heading that way
                     The Blood Rules––Light, pt.4

excerpts from the notes on the poems

On Chimes.  One admires a fable, like ‘He rose again on the third day’, but not a Divine Chemist who’s out of his skull.  If the world is not intelligible in principle, what else but Nature’s ‘insanity’ is responsible?  All right, equating the incomprehensible with insanity is wrong, a category error, but you might get my drift anyway.

On Peasant Moon.  ‘The one which would efface the many’: there is an ancient and unresolved problem as to whether ultimately everything is a One or a Many.  The matter is to be pursued by looking into what has been written about monism and pluralism. To William James, who inclined towards the importance of multiplicity, the puzzle about whether everything is ultimately a One or a Many was ‘the most central of all philosophical problems’, holding that our view on this subject determines our thinking about many other philosophical problems.  I’m inclined to believe, without sufficient argument, I might add, that in a Zen-like way Nature is both.  In this poem I see the One-aspect as crushingly inimical towards the Many-aspect, and more especially towards the many tiny spurts of insignificant selfness, i.e. consciousness.

On The Spirit of the Air.  This followed the hurricane of 1987 which most people thought unprecedented, then weather experts informed us that winds on this scale struck about every three hundred years.  Nothing to do with global warming.  The tone, rhythm and rhyming are all jocular, of course, though the theme of us against Nature isn’t.

On port isaac.  the nearest I’ve since come to spiritual ecstasy, the time I remember most, was this very physical occasion, beer in my  belly and my young family at my side, as I stood on holiday one evening in the many-peopled street of little Port Isaac in Cornwall.  It was as I describe it.  There was a Salvation Army band playing outside and between two opposing pubs.  On one side of the road was the slipway and mud, you could hardly call it a harbour, on which dinghies lay half on their sides.