A Poetry Book Introduction "Once I knew only darkness and stillness...my life was without past or future... but a little word from the fingers of another fell into my hand that clutched at emptiness, and my heart leaped to the rapture of living." Helen Keller Our perceptions and interactions make us uniquely who we are. The moment we become aware, everything speaks to us - not only people but animals, objects, music and art. Poetry first spoke to me because I was a slow reader. Poetry was short. I could manage a poem in reading time at school, going over and over it. Rhymes and rhythms helped me overcome my difficulties. "The Cat and The Moon" by Yeats was one of my first loves. I inhabited that poem and it made me want to write poems too. It spoke of love, fear and hope, and of imagination. It showed how much of our own natures is locked up inside us - far more than we understand. How little we understand of ourselves. The brain is a great mystery. No use waiting 'til it's dead and dissecting it. We can scan it live, but we will not find the mind. The mind is an emergent property that is constantly changing, mapping our past and influencing our future. Just as the mind is an emergent property of the brain, might there be an emergent property of humanity? An emergent property of the universe? Might that property not be Being itself? Consciousness? And might that Consciousness be God? We live in this marvellous universe of matter, light and energy exchanges. We perceive light and sound but it is our minds that create art and music, language and poetry. What is it that makes humans spark with creativity? What is this need to make ourselves heard within the vastness? Where do we come from and where are we going? This collection of poems explores some of the things that have spoken uniquely to me in my life, people, places and art that have inspired me - not least the ever-changing sea. Light and music are my very first memories; disjointed, non-verbal memories encapsulated in 'Parameters of Perambulator.' But memories are selective, individual, inaccurate and I have the poorest memory. So what's really real? Dreams aren't real are they - or do all our experiences contribute to personal reality - even our nightmares? The human brain - three pounds of cells - is how we make sense of the world but I have always wanted to believe that we are parts of an emergent property, bigger than our limited perceptions. And when those perceptions are no more, I don't want to be consigned to dark silence. Scatter my ashes on the sea so I can sparkle and roar a while more.
Amazon Review--J. Graham There's a lot of outstanding poetry around, but not enough readers. What makes poetry worth reading? Say the poet visits an interesting place. We all visit interesting places now and again. We're impressed, we remember the place, we tell people about it. But the poet writes about it in such a way the the place is startlingly vivid, the emotions it stirs are both strong and subtle, and the insight that emerges from it is astonishing. We read the poem and feel we have made a discovery. We possess something extraordinary that we didn't possess before. Oonah visited the Pipestone National Monument in Wisconsin, USA, and her poem 'Pipestone' has all these qualities. Read it and you make a discovery. Other places in her book, Three Pounds of Cells, places from New York to Brantwood in Cumbria, come to life in equal measure. It's not only places, but people, works of art, memories, 'ordinary' experiences made extraordinary. Poetry like this deserves a host of readers.
