First edition published May 2007; layout and design by Barbara Mueller; Printing by MegaDigital, Cape Town.

About the Book:

I first started to write poetry in my last year at school in Cape Town, 1975.
In retrospect, I can isolate three things that came together to spark me off. The first was the loss of my younger brother, Richard, who died after the last in a lifelong series of asthma attacks. Then I fell in love with the leading lady in my school drama production. And finally there was an uneasy sense of having to move on beyond the comfort zone of an unremittingly happy set of schooldays.

Ever since those years, some confluence of these three forces - loss, love and change - has found me taking refuge in verse and metre, word picture and jagged rhyme, to help me form and express my responses to their tugging. The resulting patterns are here in these pages.

This re-collection from amongst drifts of notebooks, exam papers, till slips, beer mats, theatre programmes, train timetables and air-sickness bags has given me much pleasure and pause for thought. Emotion recollected in tranquillity.

‘Enjoy!’ as Andre, the waiter in the Cat’s Pyjamas, Melville, Johannesburg, first taught me how to say with meaning.

Photos from the authors collection.

About the Author:

James Gardener is a writer, a teacher, a traveller and a coach. Recollections is an intensely personal narrative spanning thirty years and five countries that he has called home.

His poetry has been compared to an omelette of love, loss and change.
Enjoy.

All proceeds from the sale of the collection will go to the African Scholars' Fund, a Cape Town based educational trust which supports the efforts of poor, determined and talented South African students. www.asf.org.za

Also by James Gardener:

Under the Marula Tree

Faisal's Tears

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