Survival: (Despite Excellent Advice to the Contrary)

I put this collection of poetry together the winter of 2011 when we rented a small cottage on Peaks Island off the coast of Portland, Maine. I placed several of these poems online and one or two others in print on actual paper that you can hold in your hand. The majority of them I have kept private, for I have never been in any great hurry to get around to gathering, winnowing, and then releasing them to the light of day. After all, it is not a modest impulse to release a book of poems-even a self-published volume such as this one is. Hubris is attached to the action and the belief that the reader might find a poem or two in the collection that strikes a chord, calls forth a similar feeling, or perhaps a memory or two long buried because pain is what one usually associates with such memories. In this regard, I plead guilty to being immodest.

SURVIVAL, as the rather dramatic title suggests, is a record of such memories and reflections born of my own journey. It is not the complete mapping of the twisting road I have taken over the years. Whether another portion of the map will ever get into print is not dependent at all on how these tracing of one man's passage are received, but on my willingness to pick up the trail where I stopped the inward hike.

W. Houze
Wells, Maine
August 13, 2012