Start to Finish

The skeleton is a contemporary lifetime, from boyhood to old age. Organs are represented by particular events, personal, national and global - non-experience of an earthquake, loss and change in libraries, the first ascent of Everest, holidays in Cornwall and Yorkshire, Brexit and the invasion of the Ukraine - and the onward creep of infirmity at head and feet. Months, seasons and their various characteristic weather and activities contribute the flesh and muscles; and a variety of formats - rhymes in quatrains, haiku, tanka and multiple tanka, sestina and rondeau redouble, and even totally free verse - demonstrate moods and movements among which to play with the sounds and ambiguities of words.