Introduction

Having reached the age of 84, and finding several recently completed manuscripts on my desk still unpublished, I have decided, no longer having the energy to make the rounds of reluctant publishers, to send them out into cyber space so that the poems will be available for anyone who wishes to read them.

The first collection, "At the Edge of the World and Falling," consists of a number of short rhymed pieces in which the musical element is especially dominant and which I call, somewhat inaccurately, "songs ." In this respect it is a sister volume to my eighth book, "Strange Gravity," though with somewhat different themes and approaches. It is divided into three parts, the second of which is dramatic in that the "singers" in most of the poems are someone other than the poet.

The second book, "Posthumous Poems," derives its title from the fact that all the poems in it were written between the ages of 77 and 82, many years after I had stopped writing new poems at all. It differs markedly from "At the Edge of the World and Falling," in that the various pieces are more casual, conversational, and loosely structured, with very little rhyme and here and there a tinge of the surreal. I wrote them relatively quickly and with great pleasure. The two collections share a somewhat similar subject matter, but in the second I lace even some of the more serious subjects with a kind of impudent, irreverent humor which seems to please me. At any rate I hope that you find some of these poems to your taste, and that you enjoy reading them as much as I enjoyed writing them. (The title of the first section, "Collages," is an accurate description of how they were put together. In order to get my creative juices flowing after so long a break, I went back to some of my discarded pieces and extracted those lines that still pleased me, stitched them together in terms of similarities of tone, image or subject, and then finally filled in the empty spaces with whatever seemed to be needed to make a whole poem).

The third book, ,"Just For the Fun of It," is a collection of children's poems, designed to appeal to youngsters of various ages, and even to readers who have long ago left the world of childhood.