His themes range across the multiplicities of human experience, but many of the poems are quietly visionary and possess a spiritual core as hard and resonant as amber. He is drawn often to the spirit of place and to the unsentimental contemplation of the enduring grandeur of nature. This, indeed, is the kind of poetry that connects us to our common world and calls out for a common audience. In a better world, poetry would need no justification beyond the sheer splendour of its own existence. Children know this essential truth when they ask to hear their favourite nursery rhymes again and again.
Aesthetic pleasure needs no justification.
But the rest of society has mostly forgotten the value of poetry. Anyone who hopes to broaden poetry's audience faces a daunting challenge. As art forms develop, they establish conventions that guide creation, performance, instruction, even analysis. But eventually these conventions grow stale. They begin to stand between the art and its audience.