Poetry Matters – Write!

About the Book

Across the world, every autumn, thousands of young people leave their homes to study at a university, and, then, to find work in a city. Most expect to avoid cruelly hard work, with the plough, the spade, or the loom, and to find congenial work, in the air-conditioned office, at meetings, or writing reports. Then there are all the young people who will not make it to college, for one reason or another (usually, poverty). But all of you need learning and understanding, and some of it can come from writing your own poetry, or reading others’. Call my poems candles in the wind, which have illuminated my life, and others’ too, and may do the same for yours, as we all face up to the realities of our situations and societies. Seeing what is true, in our corner of civilisation, may be more useful to us, and more easily communicated, than creating or analysing verses which conform to a culture’s prevailing values. Bring your critical faculties to bear on my poetry – ask yourself, what is true in these poems, and what is not? And learn.

About the Author

Douglas is a writer. He was the first of his family to go to university full-time (Edinburgh, 1968-1972), and he taught economics for 37 years on the Jordanstown campus of the University of Ulster (UU), near Belfast. Awarded a PhD by UU in 1998, he published the thesis in a book, “Valuing Health in Practice” (Routledge 2002), and contributed a chapter to “The Art and Science of Healthcare” (ed. Kirkcaldy Hogrefe 2011). As placement tutor for economics at UU, he helped to develop research at the annual conferences of ASET*, and was made an Honorary member of the Association in 2012. He has published poetry, and has also published in health economics and computing journals, as well as writing for the UK and Irish health services. *ASET, The Work Based and Placement Learning Association aset@asetonline.org