Southampton is a port city on the south coast of England UK This is where I was born to Violet and William Gilbert the youngest of five children that survived. (Three were still born). Between the ages of five and sixteen I attended The West of England boarding school at Exeter. From there I went to Sr. Lloys College at Exeter and finished my education at The Open University, graduating in psychology and art.
I am married to Barbara and we have three grown children who have families of their own.
I started my working life at a manufacturing chemists where I met Barbara. From there I worked in pre-stressed concrete modules, steel erecting and a few other jobs while I was studying for my degree. After graduation I worked in relationship counselling and at a secure unit for adolescent children whose lives had been blighted in one way or another. I had always been interested in finding practical ways of making psychology relevant in the workplace. I joined a major international company and began a program of training the managers in transactional analysis. This allows more productive and less confrontational forms of interaction.
I started writing poetry in 1984 but then lost the urge to write. After many years my granddaughter Emily inspired me to start again, and now it has become a very big part of my life. My first book, All that Rhymes with Love, was published in March 2010, and I have a second ready for publication.
I derive a great deal of pleasure from poetry, both in writing and in the belief that there are those who get enjoyment from reading my efforts.
Favourite quotes.
They who draw noble delights from sentiments of poetry are truly poets, though they have never written a line in all their lives. George Sand.
A poem begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. Robert Frost.
Poetry is the journal of the sea animal living on land, wanting to fly in the air. Poetry is a search for syllables to shoot at the barriers of the unknown and the unknowable. Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away.
Carl Sandburg
