My passion for poetry began when, at 11 years of age, everyone in my class had to choose a poem to learn by heart. Mine was Tennyson’s Break, Break, Break from a Collin’s book of verse: one of the only four books we had in the house. Straight-forward enough for me to understand, the poem moved me and the rhyme helped the memorising.

A deep interest in psychoanalysis started in my twenties when I chanced upon Adam Phillips’s On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored on a friend’s bookcase, slipped in-between Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams and Melanie Klein’s Envy and Gratitude. I liked Adam Phillips’s arresting title and eloquent enquiry into the complexities of the mind.

Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty were linguistic dynamite and fuelled the creativity for my own book, This Thing of Darkness, which has been described as “where Wittgenstein and psychoanalysis meets the graphic novel”.

Novelists that live in my consciousness are William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Milan Kundera, Carson McCullers and Thomas Hardy, his poetry too. Today, I read very eclectically, but find myself returning to Shakespeare, Keats, Hopkins, Dickinson, and, and, and. . . At the time of writing this introduction, I am reading Louise Glück’s poetry, compelled by the honed beauty I find there.

You will see the influences of all the above present in my own work. If you choose to engage with the things I have written be it, poems in The Linguistics of Light; my creative memoir about trauma, Fathom; or the highly experimental ‘floating’ texts of This Thing of Darkness, I hope you find things that open and speak to you.