Trevor Matthews

I believe poets have a compulsion to share. Certainly when I see something that is lovely, or funny, or just plain odd and interesting, I want to tell someone about it. Otherwise that moment just dies. It’s the verbal equivalent of showing people your photographs. Then there’s rhythm, the normal flow of a sentence, the way the cadence of Lancastrian speech is so different from, say, the North East. I hope that trying to get that right introduces a sense of geography and locale in to my writing.

Biography

Trevor spent his early childhood, during the Second World War, in rural Wales.

In 1967, then a Paediatrician working at Great Ormond St Children’s Hospital, he was seconded for two years to the University of East Africa, in Kampala, at the time of the Civil War. This was a hugely formative experience for him and his young family. Other tours to the Tropics followed.

In 1972 he moved his home to the North West, so that his five children could grow up - and he could work - in unspoilt countryside. Although a full time NHS Consultant his links to Central Government continued. He still spent time overseas, writing an advisory paper on the Turks and Caicos Islands, teaching in Saudi Arabia and working in Tehran throughout the early months of the Iranian Revolution. Retired and living in the low fells, he wrote about the people who lived around him and the things in his life that he found moving or important.

Sadly, Trevor died 3rd August 2010.

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Reflection

All my travelling experiences were some time ago. I haven’t written about them and am unlikely to, but obviously the different perspective they gave me are an influence on me and my work. My poems usually come from the things around me, from the land or the skies. And for some obscure reason a bird often muscles its way in. I’ve no idea why, I’m no ornithologist and don’t even like birds particularly. Maybe it comes from the conflicts I’ve seen, and perhaps there’s some Freudian link- to freedom maybe?