What is Poetry?

I’ve added a new section called “What Is Poetry to You?” This is a space where you’re invited to share your own meaning, your own experience of poetry.

You can choose whether your response is shared on the site or kept completely private. That part is entirely up to you.

If you’d like to send something, you’ll find my contact details at the bottom of every page.

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I thought I would give you an insight into what it is for me.

What Poetry Means to Me

When I look back at the poems, songs, fragments and stories I’ve written over the years, one truth becomes clear: poetry isn’t something I do, it’s something I live through. It’s the place where memory, loss, resilience, humour, imagination and identity all meet when ordinary language falls short.

This is what poetry has come to mean to me.

A Second Voice When the First Fell Silent

There was a time when music was the centre of my creative world. Then hearing loss and Diplacusis arrived, and the guitar and voice once my anchor, became unpredictable.

But the voice didn’t disappear.

It simply changed shape.

Poetry became the rhythm I could still trust. A way to keep melody alive when sound itself became unreliable.

A Way to Process What Life Doesn’t Explain

Grief, war, trauma, identity, the loss of silence, the weight of memory, these aren’t abstract themes for me.

They’re lived experiences that found their way onto the page because they needed somewhere to go.

Poetry became the place where I could ask the questions that don’t have answers, and sit with the emotions that don’t resolve neatly.

A Thread Connecting Past and Present

My Scottish poems aren’t just nostalgia.

They’re a way of keeping heritage alive, the landscapes, the voices, the stories, the ghosts.

Even while living in São Paulo, poetry lets me walk the hills of home, speak with the ancestors, and carry forward the threads of a culture that shaped me.

A Bridge to People, Places, and Moments

Whether I’m writing about love, friendship, my dog, a city street, or a fleeting memory, poetry is how I stay connected.

It’s how I reach out.

How I listen.

How I stay open to the world.

Even the children’s poems, playful, warm, imaginative, come from that same instinct to connect.

A Way to Turn Pain Into Purpose

Many of my poems are about resilience, not because I set out to be inspirational, but because writing is how I refuse to be defeated by the things life throws at me.

Poetry is where I turn struggle into meaning.

Where I turn fear into movement.

Where I turn silence into voice.

A Home for Imagination

Talking suns and moons.

Cutlery with personalities.

A philosophical cockroach.

A wandering storyteller.

Poetry is the one place where imagination doesn’t need permission.

It can be strange, playful, mythic, surreal, whatever the moment calls for.

My Life, Told in Fragments

Time Passes So Fast isn’t just a collection of poems that I have written (and hope to publish)

It’s a map of my life, every era, every wound, every joy, every shift in identity.

Poetry lets me tell my story without ever needing to say, “This is my story.”

So What Does Poetry Mean to Me?

It’s the voice that rose when music fell.

It’s the bridge between Scotland and Brazil.

It’s the way I honour the people I’ve loved and lost.

It’s the way I stay alive to myself.

It’s the place where memory, imagination, and resilience meet.

Poetry is not something I write.

It’s something I live.