Alan Mitchell has worked as a craftsman and as a lecturer. Nature has always given meaning to his life, whether in mountains or the garden. Editor, of an RHS Journal, enabled him to write about his obsession, Lilium. In his life he has loved and for that he is grateful. Suffering loss and grieving has made him more human, although he is guarded with people. Poetry has always attracted him, because it crystallises experience, by stripping away mental clutter. It also stops time. For him, poetry has a magical quality which imbues the words with a freshness that defies the passage of time. Hence, if you didn’t know that Pindar had written the poem you are reading over two thousand years ago, you might conclude it was written yesterday.

• Tigers; Quirigua; At Camus’s grave; Happiness Lost; Sisyphus and I; By Plockton; Someday; Who’s taller; Words fail us; Waiting; Poem for Jet; Fragments of loss; Going Nowhere; “Horse”; Smiling Irony; The only reality; The tool shed; Father and son; Introduction – Poem; Token grief; Emptiness; Silver blade; Funchal; Howarth; Should snow baboons melt with the snow; Mayan creation myth (adapted); Peter; Lewis Pass (NZ); “Character is fate”; Beyond this sound; Sun; The supplicant who petitions humbly; Mentor and nemesis; The weight; Apparently; Searching for certainty; The sound of Ruth; The hanged mouse; Altitude lost, I gained Spring; The Forge (An Teallach); The Sumatran Rhinoceros; The Ice Axe; Fishing (1); Fishing (2); Fishing (3); Still; Forever is a long time; Reduced; Homecoming; Waiting and hoping; The path; A memory; Invisible walls; Meconopsis; A room of human concepts;