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A note on the origin of this book
I first met John Smith while visiting his father, who was a client of my legal firm. With his flowing shoulder-length hair and ethereal good looks Smith embodied the Pre Raphaelites' ideal of a Romantic poet. After a brief conversation he went out to lounge in the summerhouse and study the large volume he was carrying. This was Watson's classic treatise on molecular biology.
Our second meeting took place eleven years later in my office, when I read his father's will. He was the sole heir. By then he was based in the States and about to embark on a career as a pathologist. He placed the winding up of the estate in my hands, including the sale of the family home and its contents and instructed that items of no monetary value should be sent to the garbage dump.
However, by temperament I am loathe to throw things away, even the knick-knacks of someone else's life. I donated them to a charity shop. There was also a box of scruffy typewritten poems I found locked in a cupboard in the summerhouse, valueless to the charity sector, they did rouse the curiosity of a friend, an independent publisher and editor, and I duly foisted them onto him. Against expectation, he elected to publish a selection. My only stipulation, out of respect to my client, has been that the work must appear under a pseudonym.
Editor's note
The original MS consists of 253 unnumbered, typed pages, heavily corrected in biro and mildewed. There is also an unlined notebook with "Titles" written on the front and two hand-written columns covering the first five pages and these presumably are the titles of the poems. These are followed by two quotations. There is no indication of how the titles relate to the poems, which anyway are not arranged in any appreciable order. Two poems do have titles on their respective pages. For the rest, I have simply appended the first page of detached titles as a sample. Regarding the poems, discerning which were the author's final emendations was often impossible, so, in the main, I have chosen the variations that seemed to make the most sense. In some few places the text is indecipherable and I have been constrained to fill the lacunae with asterisks.
