Foreword by Ian McColm

And I find last year's diary
 in a drawer, not dusty yet
read book titles, MOT
 and a horse which won a bet.

 ‘Saturday Afternoon’ concludes

  ... diaries cannot remake
  bits of unremembered talk.

David Green's poetry, at its best, runs counter to this view: over twenty years, and in seven slim self-produced volumes, he has crafted and recreated a variety of remembered experience. Like diaries, his poems are always worth re-reading. 

Themes of time, memory and place recur; love and lost love are recalled; classical art rubs shoulders with popular culture. And yet, he cannot be pinned down; no party line imposes itself. Above all, there is the sense of raw vulnerability that comes from unremitting disbelief, a relentlessly scouring skepticism.

But doubt beyond consolation? Fortunately, no; the consolations of art prevail. His is a distinctively English voice: rational, literate, unassuming; highly intelligent and surprisingly moral; constantly seeking solace and significance in the meaning beyond ordered words, which is the essence of all good poetry.

..............where
jabbering starlings gather
and their fragile energy
grieves not in the frantic air
                                                                                'Rough'

David Green does not rage against the dying of the light, but instead - almost in spite of himself - he sounds a lyric note of cautious celebration; a celebration of life's small mercies, which is the expressed gratitude of art. We, too, should be grateful for that.