I have been writing poetry since I was around 15 years old, the first piece I wrote was for a piece of GCSE coursework (I still have it somewhere) and I wrote on an off for a couple of years after I had left school. Then I met my soulmate, my beautiful wife Nicola, and I began to write words for her. It’s a cliché that men write love poems for the girl in their life and I was no exception. The first poem I wrote to her was the poem entitled ‘You’ and for the next several years I wrote for her, the poems chart our relationship, they show the growth of our little family when our boys came along, but mostly they tell of my love for her.
In 2016 we appeared on the TV program Doctor in the House in the hope that we could find a ‘cure’ for Nicola’s ME that she’d had since 2010. Then the dam of words was broken and I began to write every single day, sometimes several times a day. A flood of emotions and thoughts demanded an outlet, so I let them out. Many of these poems are in the first volume and some will be in the third.
Then Nicola died and my world collapsed around me and our boys. Everything changed on that Wednesday evening as I watched her take her final breath. Yet I continued to write, I charted my grief through the over 100 poems that I wrote in that first year after her death, some of these poems became my second published volume ‘After You’.
So here I am, a still grieving widow whose life is struggling to begin again, hoping that some of my words resonate with the world and that somewhere, somehow, my beautiful Nicola can see that I am carrying on…or trying to.
Love to you all.
Ian