Happy New Year to all our ancestors,
The rich ones (you) who made the lake, and me
Who called a remote gardener to his tea.
Mine have all died back and so have yours.


from `Stourhead'
             

Patricia Beer's Friend of Heraclitus is made up of fifty new poems written since the publication of her Collected Poems in 1988. The book is in three parts. `Wessex Calendar' is a sequence of twelve sonnets, following the months of the year, each focusing on a building or landscape in her native South West, including Stourhead, Clouds Hill and the woods at Wordsworth's Alfoxden. `Observations' is a set of modern imagist verses. The third and largest part of the book consists of poems on diverse themes: reflections on childhood and middle age, reading, travel, and reactions to happenings in the world around us, past and present.

Patricia Beer works in many forms, from blank verse to syllabics and the freer metres of today.