The Last Book of a Remnant Man

Of our conflicts with others we make rhetoric; of our conflicts with ourselves we make poetry. --William Butler Yeats,

FROM THE AUTHOR: I began writing The Last Book of a Remnant Man in January, 1996. It was a tense period, as I was going through the angst of losing a good job during a recession and having to start a new career as a freelance journalist, a marital breakup and the initial experiences of aging (I was 71 at the time).

Most of the material in the first section, “Impulse and Compulsion,” was written during the first two years. It depicts my struggle to externalize introspective thoughts and feelings. For those, like me, born to be an introvert, expression is a strenuous journey. A struggle, but also an adventure and a challenge; an odyssey to unexpected and sometimes disturbing, often illuminating discoveries.

But self-absorption can be fatal, and the remnant man opened up to a broader world of reflections and observations leading to the second section, “Reaching Out,” and the somewhat capricious “Whimsies and Random Reflections.”

Further excursions led to indulgence in felicitous Haiku, frolicking Limericks, and in “Saying and Seeing,” to combining text and graphics for delightfully enhanced presentations