The Voice in the Wood

The easiest part of putting together a collection of poetry is deciding what not to include. I wonder if all poets are humbled by the bulk of their efforts and the mediocrity of so much of it. Of course a declaration such as this opens the door to criticism as the implication is that these poems represent my best work. Indeed I have tried to revise and improve on the older poems and I feel I have done my best. But the critic would be missing the main point. Basically, these are just poems that I like, it's that simple. I harbor no delusions of being the next great American poet. What follows are poems mainly written while I was between the ages of twenty and thirty. As such, I could excuse some of them as products of the excessive emotion of youth. I could, but I will not since advancing age has chosen not to spare me those same excesses. The more recent work, I would hope, contains the same naive passion as the poems from my youth.