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Author's Foreword
The poems in Voluntary Exile might be considered juvenilia except that the verse I wrote as an adolescent was heavily Victorian and Georgian. Though I had unnerved the Colwyn Bay librarian by taking out Ulysses (it was kept under lock and key, and I was reported to my headmaster, who wondered laconically how I was enjoying it), probably, the most Modern poems I'd read were by Hardy and Hopkins. I don't remember reading Eliot or Yeats until I was at Cambridge. Nothing written during my high-school and university years has survived, and for good reason. Cambridge in the late 'fifties was not a place for Tennyson. Though I was hardly aware of it at the time, the local literary establishment worshiped at the shrine of what came to called The Movement. Someone brought up on The Idylls of the King, the Odes of Keats, and samplings of Milton, was going to have a hard time among those who thought William Empson the acme of contemporary talent. Furthermore, as the young disciples of F. R. Leavis edited the undergraduate literary magazines, if one didn't have "edge"—whatever that meant—there was no way for someone like me to sidle in. I decided I should become an artist. That's another story.
Happily, I had good friends, brighter and better read than I, who liked to read poetry, and Rodney Hillman, John Woolley, Jehane Barton and I spent many evenings reading aloud from the Faber Book of Modern Verse or the Oxford Book of American Verse. Even now, I can remember the delicately impassioned voice of Jehane—sitting on the floor next to the gas fire—reading of Colonel Fantock or of Hasbrouck who ate the rose. I never belonged to the "in" crowd, but we (at least Woolley and I) gained a balanced education between these soirées and intellectual evenings at one of half-a-dozen pubs. Jump-cut to Aix-en-Provence, where John and I lived with our French wives. Gradually, I began to write little poems that resembled not at all what was fashionable in Cambridge. For me, there was a new friend and a new influence: Ted Blodgett, who was living in Aix, too, with his German wife and whose spare, spiritual lyrics (printed in lower case and read in low prayer-like tones) presented me with something I'd never read before. When we went our separate ways, Ted and I wrote letters to each other almost by return mail for a number of years. I moved to Bournemouth on England's south coast, and Ted moved to Edmonton, Alberta, where he was to teach medieval comparative literature and eventually to publish many remarkable books of verse. Over the years, he, introduced me to the poetry of Robert Bly and James Wright, which led me to subscribe to Bly's magazine, The Sixties.
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This meandering preamble leads me to a little book of poems, typed on my Olivetti and stitched into brown boards, which I gave to my father before I moved from Bournemouth to Brussels in 1964. I forgot all about it, and I lost whatever drafts I must once have had. It was some twenty years later, during one of my trips back to England from the Stales, that my father brought out that book and gave it back to me. I have not edited it, and have chosen simply to preserve the whole collection as a single document. Perhaps Voluntary Exile is of archival interest. There are probably echoes of it in subsequent poems. 
