THIS BEING EDEN
Poems by Roger Caldwel

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Roger Caldwell was born in St Albans, Hertfordshire, has subsequently lived in Canada, Germany and Iran, and is now living in Wivenhoe, Essex. He first started writing poetry at the age of 14, and as a result found himself a suspect in an investigation into the serial murder of prostitutes - the poems appeared to describe the rape and murder of a woman and the concealment of her body. He then gave up poetry to study philosophy at University, thinking it might be safer. After acquiring a wife and child, he returned to poetry and currently hedges his bets between literature and philosophy, writing as critic / reviewer / essayist for, inter alia, Times Literary Supplement, New Statesman, London Magazine, Philosophy Now and Planet. His poetry has appeared in literary journals in the United Kingdom, United States, and Canada. This Being Eden is his first collection of poetry.

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This Being Eden

There was, it is true,
a garden of sorts - and a tree
of a kind our science deemed impossible:
we were not tempted by its shrivelled fruits.

There was a path as well
where two had trod - the naked toes
and stubborn heels were clear,
imprinted in dried mud, and showed
no hurry on that journey out.

Serpents were little in evidence.
Of beauty - there were butterflies, of course,
as much as there were beetles, snails, and slugs.
The early reports, we all agreed,
had somewhat written up the scene
whose history was desolation.

In darkest moments we rehearsed
the rigours of our coming here,
the heartbreaks, shipwrecks and the cost
of having travelled out so far,
the scorn we'd meet at our return
if lacking proof we hadn't tarried
at the blissful isles we never found,
of basilisks
                 -We thought it best,
this being Eden, and this time around,
remembering an exile once, to settle, try
to make a garden worthy of the wilderness.

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THIS BEING EDEN
Price £7.95 per copy post free (£5.30 post free to Associate Members)
Cover illustration: Adam and Eve in Paradise, Origin: Bohemian - Moravian Highlands. Size 42 x 31cm. T. Martin Museum Czechoslovakia.
Publication: SPRING 2001 (63 pages laminated paperback)