Twenty Tropes for Doctor Dark

‘These poems were written during the last three months of the 20th century, most of them in Cassis. The Mediterranean orbit, Phoenicians and fish, local dogs and children, drew close as I wrote. From poem to poem I knew what I was doing, but the ensemble, after much sifting, took me by surprise... a sub-textual motif recurred contrapuntally – touch. The tropes summon a “Doctor Dark”, who is fully there only once, and then in the past. That you may come to harm in purgatory without a guide is what the epigraph from Dante tells.’ – Christopher Middleton