Just Watch Your Step

About the Book

"The poems in this selection are accompanied by pictures from photographs taken by the author which invite the reader to work out his or her own interpretation of them. Like the poems, some are easy to read, others more difficult, but they complement the text in various ways. The poems are different from my previous collection, Inventing Parents, published in 2003., which contained several sequences, and in which the predominant note was elegiac. They fall into three groups: one takes for topics travel, history and the world today; the second group grows out of personal issues, including encounters with love, illness and death; and the third group consists of poems that offer a more humorous or sardonic commentary on aspects of present-day life"

About the Author

The author, Reg Foakes, was born in England, but has lived many years in the United States, where he has enjoyed a career as a university teacher, editor, and writer of literary criticism. He does not have much sympathy with the current fashion for verse that is virtually indistinguishable from prose, and prefers mainly to work with stanza forms, regular lines and sometimes rhyme. As Ezra Pound wrote, “Poetry begins to atrophy when it gets too far from music”