Today I welcome Hedgehog Poetry Press poet, Brian McManus to reflect upon a poem from his new collection, Solastalgia

Definition of Antecedent (Cambridge English Dictionary)

‘Something existing or happening before, especially as the cause or origin of something existing or happening later.’

How important, or otherwise, are our antecedents? How, if at all, do they impact, colour or shape that which follows, comes later? We are all guilty of sometimes castigating ourselves for missed opportunties, beomaning what might have been if we had acted differently, or indeed simply just acted at all.

Philip Larkin, one of post-war Britain’s most popular and famous poets, opined that the way in which we live, the actions we take or fail to take do absolutely colour and shape our lives. A failure to seize opportunity when it presents itself he would call ‘time torn-off unused’.

In my poem Antecedents above I acknowledge that…