Walled Garden

By Trevor Wright

Trevor’s recent collection of poetry, Salt Flow, is available from Trevor direct trefjohn@hotmail.com for £10 inc p&p or from https://www.bigwhiteshed.co.uk/shop

I am one of those annoying people who can write anywhere, whether that is in a bar, surreptitiously in work or halfway up a hill in the rain on my bike. Out comes the phone or any scrap of paper and down goes the lines that are in my head. That continued throughout Covid and Walled Garden is an amalgam of impressions noted whilst walking the dog round the local park between April and June this year.  What I can’t do anywhere though is edit and finish work and to do this properly I must be sat at my computer, sometimes spending hours getting one line alone right, and I found that very difficult during Covid.

It wasn’t until the summer when we came out of lockdown 1.0. that this improved and I couldn’t work out why I found editing and finishing poems even harder than usual.  Was it the lack of structure, worry about friends and family, anxiety about getting it myself, general sense of things getting out of hand or the sadness that seemed to hang over so much?  I’m still not sure but am glad that I did manage to record those impressions at the time, other wise the poem might never have happened. Having a project like this to focus on then motivated me to hone it to the point where I was confident enough to share it.