These poems were written in a disturbing and troubling context – an emotional time of absence and loss which also proved to be an opportunity to search and remember. Out of the shadows, the darkness, and often the injustice, the need to lament and mourn goes hand in hand with the special significance of small moments and ordinary occasions.   So the poems attempt to express the poet’s calling and the value of poetry and creativity as they contemplate moments of loss and joy, both in my own life and in the lives of others near and far. And above all else Wintersong is a book with a longing to keep hope alive.More than human wisdom,looking is the poet’s charge:to mark and mourndeath and loss;to not let things go byunnoticed; to respondto the daily miracles, the musicof wind in the trees,across stones, in the grass,the shimmer of the willow –how I see your facein the darkness of absence.(‘From within the dark times’)