michael pitman

What pleasure just to bask

   in ancient tree-light, Puck-like

propped against a trunk beneath the boughs

   that sway this forest family.....

What can be said about a poem better than reading it? This collection of about fifty 'lights' is drawn from material written between 1962 and 1988 but mostly during the period 1965-75 (the author's twenties). It celebrates nature's beauty, romance, music, sex, mystic love and even the sad demise of steam engines!

As regards philosophical element an analyst might discern a thread running between A Cluster of Lights and the author's works like Adam and Evolution and, latterly, Science and the Soul. If true, such thread constitutes an embryonic, unwitting precursor because 'Cluster' is clearly not scientific. Instead, its rationale embodies a literary compression whose spring of words may equally powerfully propel the reader into flights of understanding, universal principle and quickening imagination.