Anywhere You Like
Sendai: Pine Wave Press, 2000
Anywhere You Like is a hors de commerce edition limited to 126 signed copies of twenty-two poems mostly written after finishing About Time Too. It came to be published at the suggestion of Naoki Ishihata, one of my colleagues at Tohoku University, who also typeset the book. The cover is a watercolour done, quite independently and with no thought of making it public, to entertain myself while overseeing a bit of painting that my two daughters were doing. As I wrote in the note at the back of the edition: 'During the period in which these poems were written, I have grown more used to the idea that I'm now living in three different places: Japan, where I work; Italy, where my wife's family live; and England, where I was born. Of course this is a state of mind, rather than a material fact; but it is one which new means of rapid communication and the relative ease of long-distance travel have made seem natural. These three countries, with which I am directly involved, have very distinct languages and cultures. The poems collected here respond variously to these places and, naturally enough, to the histories of my relations with them' - 'Animal Sendai', for example, a poem about the zoo just two bus stops away from our Japanese flat. I hope one day to collect these twenty-two pieces as the first section of a full-scale book.
Sendai: Pine Wave Press, 2000