The earliest poems in John Welch’s first full-length collection are short poems written in the late sixties. In the seventies his writing became more consciously experimental, as in the ‘Grieving Signal’ poems, but without losing sight of a proper human context for the concerns of poetry. In these sober and skilfully modulated poems his evocations of city life are both memorable and distinctive.

John Welch has written of his approach to poetry: ‘Language as behaviour, not purely as communication; communication would simply involve following a set of coded signals. The poem is a way of behaving-in-language; it must exist in its own terms, and not as an equivalent of the “real world”. Just as language-as-behaviour may be unnecessary, gratuitous, eccentric, personal, so poetry, as an epitome of language, may be all of these things. In a period so dominated by false notions of necessity, where the individual does not often have a chance to define his or her own true needs, the gratuitousness of poetry may constitute its special value.’