Stephen Gospage

Bedside Days: A collection of sixty poems Stephen Gospage

A collection which begins with a description of a man's slow (indeed, apparently endless) decline may suggest that Bedside Days offers a bleak outlook on life. However, by the end of the sixty poems in this book, readers should have sampled all aspects of the human condition: its sadness and foibles, certainly, but also its capacity for creating beauty and doing good. Overall, the writer has sought to give the collection a positive, even optimistic, tone. War and dystopian futures are present, but humour is never too far away. Whether they refer to actors struggling to play corpses, a soldier confronted by a painting of a battle he had taken part in, the noise of a distant train through a window, a man who once aced a pre-war tennis champion or to the exultant, incomparable pleasures of love, the poems are first and foremost intended to be enjoyed.