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Lockdown Poems

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About The Author

Kevin Grozier

Kevin Grozier

Kevin Grozier was born in Guildford, Surrey in 1949 and there followed a somewhat turbulent childhood where he grew up appreciating the peace provided by the lakes, rivers and countryside of the Surrey Hills around the small town of Godalming. He spent much of his adult working life in the Insurance industry, starting in London, but still yearning for the sanctuary of quiet open spaces. He was delighted therefore, when in 1973, the company he worked for de-centralised to Hampshire and following a period where he set up home in Southampton he finally settled in the market town of Ringwood on the edge of The New Forest where he has lived since 1987.

None of his poems are directly about fishing though many allude to the ambience of the surroundings he finds himself in pursuit of this pastime. His passion for the hobby itself, but more significantly perhaps, the affinity he feels for the countryside of both his childhood and now Wessex has helped significantly to lessen the impact of the volatile emotional switchback that was his early life from childhood to young adult.
This work covers the intensity and unprecedented trials and stresses of the 2020-2022 lockdowns, including withering footnotes as to the shortcomings of some public authorities in regard to responses to this crisis plus some of the environmental problems of the day. The book also includes, as an appendix all the poems first published under the title The Lost Fisherman.

Arising from the repetitive, seemingly endless lockdowns of the Covid pandemic, sad and difficult times for many, and felt especially keenly by the author, who by his own admission, detests enforced confinement. Denied the open spaces and Idyllic countryside and riverside settings of the Wessex countryside, he wrote these poems and the prose “(the dust & detritus I scratch them in)” to capture the texture of the period 2020-2022. This book, far from being unremittingly gloomy actually chronicles a full range of human hopes, fears sadness and pleasure together with the issues brought into focus by the times, and not least his irreverent humour at the ageing process!

Also included as an appendix are all the poems from “The Lost Fisherman & Other Poems” printed in 2020 by another publisher but withdrawn from their list after the author terminated their agreement. These are poems that date from the author’s very first efforts at poetry in 1968 until 2019.