The AuthorAlan Clifton (who we just referred to as 'Dad') was born in the same year as Mickey Mouse. That picture over there to the right; that's was him sometime in his 60's. He didn't look too different from that when he passed away in his early 90's. A little bit older, and a little less serious, perhaps ...at times.
In this 'blog' we share some of his poetry. He wasn't on the internet. In fact, he never had a computer. He had a tablet for a while. It didn't go well. As he often said, he'd only just mastered the telephone, so we shouldn't have burdened him with something more. So this blog page was created for him. We started it while he was living. We will continue it occasionally now he's passed. Dad wrote various verses about things like life and old age, but the topics he returned to over and again were religion and human behaviour. Collected here (so far, at least) are a number of these latter types, particularly expressing his concerns about faith vs fact, religion vs realism, and piety vs ethical sensibility. I describe them as "sardonic, sarcastic and searching." More will be added hereafter. Dad was not an academic and wasn't trying to do what academic poets might. Fun, free verse and word-play were simply modes of expression he enjoyed, and he could sometimes be as liberal with ideas and historical elements. His poetry often has a limerick-like rhythm, or what might be felt as a gentle sing-songishness, and the subject matter is to be understood, I think, with equal shares of seriousness (he really means what he writes) and tongue-in-cheek humour (he'd be pleased if you sometimes chuckle). Feel free to read them out loud with all that in mind, and in the way an old Cockney-come-Colonial might do (since that's what he was who wrote them). Thanks for reading. |