Introduction

The poems in this book have spent a long time on the shelf. Scribbled at ungodly hours in dozens of notebooks of all shapes and sizes, they have been valuable possessions of mine for years. I would pack them up with every move, from the mouldy bedsits I occupied while at college, to the beautiful cottage I live in now. But they have always been there, lurking in the shadows.

When feeling brave I would type up a few and send them ‘out there', pushing them through the bright red jaws of a Royal Mail pillar box. Most of the time they appeared on the doormat a few weeks later in an envelope inked in my own familiar scrawl – the essential SAE. But when they were published I filled a bookshelf with my trophies, like a veteran pins medals on his lapel.

Things have changed though, and these days I'm more apathetic towards the business side of writing. I believe a poem must stand alone, whether published in a leatherette built-in-bookmark hardback, or left to yellow in a bottom drawer – it really doesn't matter. Getting work published should always be secondary to the writing. Sometimes you just don't feel like justifying your couplet to an editor or critic. You like the poem, and that's enough.

And this of course is absolutely necessary.

So why a red book? There are many reasons. Firstly, it is the colour which invades my liminal memories… from the scarlet walls of my first bedroom, to the blazing sunsets I watched over the pyramids of Egypt. It is also my favourite colour, the one I have always been unable to resist.

This colour is so many things: BLOOD.. INFECTED. DANGER, DO NOT ENTER. UNPAID BILLS. THE STOP SIGN. RED LIGHTS. SOMETHING TO DECLARE. SEEING RED. AGGRESSION. MULETA. RED HANDED. RED HERRING. RED TAPE. FIRE. PASSION…

Red has a reputation, and in all its tones is a warning to us all.

It is also the colour publishers are most reluctant to use on book covers as it fades in the sun, slowly dimming year after year. As the years pass this book will grow old. I will enjoy this process for it mirrors life:

Nothing ever stays the same.

When putting together this little book I tried to arrange the work in order of composition, but doing this from memory has been difficult. The poems were not written as a collection – they just are.

Ben Barton