Late Starter

By Robert Ferguson

This is a picture book in words. Each poem stimulates an image of the worlds in which we live, their hills and mountains, cold northern seas and hot deserts, war, peace, loneliness, and the comfort of friends and child-filled families, together with reminders of the inner matters of the soul—faith, worship, birth, death, and the hereafter. It is a book to excite, stir, inspire, and frequently to raise a smile at the memories we all share.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Apr 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781546289654

Robert Ferguson

Robert Ferguson was born in the UK in 1948 and left school in 1966. He worked at a number of jobs including postman, hospital porter, deckhand on a trawler, factory worker, cook, driver etc before enrolling at UCL, London in 1976 and taking a course in Scandinavian Studies. He graduated in 1980. In 1983 he emigrated to Norway and has made his home there since. He began his literary career as a radio dramatist, translating and adapting for radio works by Knut Hamsun and Henrik Ibsen for the BBC. He has also written eleven original radio plays and twice won the BBC Methuen Giles Cooper Award for Best Radio Drama, in 1984 and 1986. His first literary biography was Enigma: The Life of Knut Hamsun, which was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Best Biography Award in 1987. It also won the University of London J.G.Robertson Award. In 1996 Enigma was dramatized as a 6-part television series by NRK (Norwegian State Television) As well as literary biographies and a history of the Vikings, Ferguson has written two novels, published only in Norwegian.

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© 2018 Robert Ferguson. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 03/19/2018

ISBN: 978-1-5462-8967-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-8966-1 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5462-8965-4 (e)

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Scripture quotations marked NRSV are taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, Copyright © 1989, by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. [Biblica]

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611. Quoted from the KJV Classic Reference Bible, Copyright © 1983 by The Zondervan Corporation.

Contents

Introduction

I Red Flares and Other Events

Red Flares

Caught In The Hills

Violets

Ritual: Penn Hill

Overture And Beginners

Flamenco

Sun, Shade And Cyclamen

School Matinee

Nefusa, 1967

Many Reluctant Returns

Sequential Life

Mr. Hughes’ Removal Van

Interior Decoration

The Cottage By The Golf Course

Sealers

Sonnet To An Old-Fashioned Librarian

At The Marriage Of …

Beached People

Fireworks

That Hand At Table

A Childhood Garden In Kent

Into Care

Aleppo, 2016

II Characters Known & Unknown

The Old Toby-Jug Maker

Rembrandt – Self-Portraits

Councillor Carter

Working From Home

Moving House

What Does She Do?

My Grandpa’s Beard

Buttons

Welsh Row, Beam Street

Views Across The Tyne

The Bear’s Spring

Heritage

Autumn

Weekend Neighbours

The Expert

No Click-And-Drop For Me!

Love Is Not Everything

Next Door

Caravaggio

Spring In A Winter Place

Valentine For A Long-Standing Relationship

Khrushchev’s Shoe

The Engineer And The Poet

What Do You Make?

Martyred By Lions

Victim’s Possessions

The English Mystery

III Cats & Other Creatures

Sunny

The Visiting Dragon

Cat, Dreaming

Sonnet Of New Life

Steps

Prejudices And Realities

Bought At The Sales

Gabble-Gobble

Owl

In Pusscat’s Power

IV Soul Poems

Midnight Sparrow

Fatherhood

And The Cars Went By

Christmas, Here And Now

Coincidences?

You Are The Other

Questions

Doubt And Faith

The Solution Was There All The Time!

Where Is It, And What Is It For?

Wakefulness

Diver

Lidded Pots

Sunday

To A Monastery Guesthouse

Merton

Eight Stones

Sunrise, On May-Morning

Creation

Abandoned

Cathedral Close

The Last Task

Funeral, And Beyond

And Next ..?

Introduction

I was brought up in a home and school of traditional English culture in the 1950’s. Together with the strict musical disciplines of cathedral choristership, these influences encouraged and inculcated an early appreciation of classical English poetry – Chaucer in Coghill’s bouncing translation as well as the original author’s fascinating French/Italian 13th Century English, Shakespeare, Shelley, Colleridge, Wordsworth and their peers – and of the beauty of 16th Century Church-Latin in the anthems of Thomas Tallis and William Byrd and the rhythmic poetry of the King James’ version of the Bible. Inevitably, these influences left indelible marks in the working of mind, memory and inherent taste.

Early poems appreciative of pretty girls were giggled-over embarrassingly by the recipients and their friends, and my only school prize came from the annual poetry competition in which mine was the sole entry (it was a somewhat macho school); and then university, work and family intervened, and I wrote only for others, the formal prose of academic papers, business proposals and reports, briefings and statements, and letters in measured terms to the better newspapers. Perhaps this, too, had its effect, for I am aware that my poetry is not obscure, or at least is intended not to be so. Decades of being required habitually to seek clarity in written communication has been added to a nature impatient with writings from which the reader is required to chisel the author’s meaning or motivation from the obscurity either of convolution or of minimalist three-word lines.

After some thirty-odd years of intense work, responsibility and travel, I collapsed. Perhaps frustration had something to do with it? Not being able to do what I was meant to do? Who knows? For some months, I was too exhausted to be concerned that no clear diagnosis was ever offered. While eventually beginning to recover, however, I began to paint, deepened my knowledge of theology, and took up the daily duties of sacristan in our local parish church, until cancer struck both my wife and myself.

No longer capable of looking after ourselves, we moved into a care home, where I led and wrote for a Poetry Group of residents, from which much of the content of this collection arose. When my wife died, I moved out of the care home to resume the quiet of independent life, rebuild a support-network of friends old and new, and begin to consider, expand and organise the material that follows.

The book is in four sections. Each could make a separate pamphlet, if I were confident that I had time to arrange and publish them in that form. But I am not, so they are (almost) all here, and the individual reader will inevitably find more to interest them in one section than another.

The first section, ‘Red Flares and other events’, is characterised by