Michael Kilby
These poems were almost all written for emotional reasons and are all to some extent "confessional". Most poems are. But truth is only a starting point, the finished poem describing an experience, not an event.
Some of these poems were written in other eras, when life seemed simpler. I have tried to resist the urge to change them, not always successfully. But, as Peter Dale has expressed it "Hindsight brings just another kind of partial judgement".
Michael Kilby was born in Sussex during the Second World War. He went to school in Wimbledon and took a first degree at Durham University, a Masters at Leicester and a Doctorate at Magdelan College, Oxford.
He lived and worked in Montreal, Toronto and New York, being involved in publishing and the music business. Later he moved to London to run an international advertising agency.
Michael now lives in the Cotswolds and in Adelaide with his Australian wife, Licette.
Too Late to be a Hero is a book of poetry written during his time in all of the above places. The poems are written in a number of forms from sonnet and sestina to rhyme royal and villanelle. They represent, in the main, an emotional reaction to his life experiences.
December
The garden sleeps now. Most trees are undressed,
Flaunting their naked loins. Summer clothes strewn
Wet on the grass, clogging pool and soon
Mulch. Bare trees are sad; they shake their distressed
Limbs like a drunk Finn. Round upturned barrow
Runs a desperate squirrel. Two magpies peck
Their stately way; meagre all. A few specks
Of seed, a nut, till winter turns and furrow
Deepen. Now the house preens, staring through glass,
Puffing smoke at the sky, lights flickering
At the jerky sparrows and single robin;
How do they propagate, one in a class?
The conifers are welcome now, though cursed
In summer for pine-cones under the mower
And needles in Pimms. Now almost a bower
Above the grass: the greensward is rehearsed.
