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Sebastian Barker

Guarding the Border

• Poetry • Paperback

Description:

Sebastian Barker was born in Gloucestershire in 1945. He has M.A.s in Natural Science from Oxford and in English Literature from the University of East Anglia. He has worked as a carpenter, fireman, cataloguer of rare books at Sotheby's, and writer-in-residence at Bracknell and Stamford. In 1984 he helped inaugurate the Surrey Literature Festival and in 1985 co-directed the first Royal Berkshire Poetry Festival. He has been on the executive committee of P.E.N. and from 1988 to 1992 was Chairman of The Poetry Society. His previous collections include On the Rocks (1977), A Fire in the Rain (1982) and A Nuclear Epiphany (1984). He is also the author of The Dream of Intelligence (1992), which traces the personal and intellectual development of Fredrich Nietzsche. Sebastian Barker lives in London and spends part of each year at a house he built in the Peloponnese in Greece.

‘A brilliant and original voice.’ Harold Pinter

‘A genuine and delicate poet.’ John Heath-Stubbs

Shockwaves
(for Robert Nye)

O green and gracious Greece, in early May
I saw you young and walking on your way
Tender with flowers, taunting me in bars
I slipped between, detoxified, to be
The human philosophical vision
Of the blue sanctuary of the sea
And the iconostasis of the stars.