100 POINTS OF ID (paperback)

Paperback
71 pp.

Independently published 2021.

Foreword by Tim Rogers:

During this autumn like no other, I go walking at night hoping to get the whiff of smoke from a functioning chimney. My olfactory system then presents me with dozens of images and memories. For a reason I can’t articulate, the smell of chimney smoke assures me my heightened emotional state is not a sign of falling apart, but a reminder to let go.

Darby and I have not met face to face yet. We communicate in the modern ways, but his poems and communication remind me of chimney smoke.
I don’t know what stokes the quiet flame. I can’t see who stands in front of it warming their heart and skin. But these smoke signals energise my thoughts,
untangle them, and I can walk on with levity. He writes of the grace of solitude, the succour of nature, feeling out of step with the humans we share geography with. And he is wickedly funny.

I searched for his poems because he wrote to say that we pass each other gambolling on our own around the streets and canals where we share a postcode. When I discovered HE was the one who pinned poems to the trees that line the canals I knew I needed to buy his work. I’d said flippantly before that writing songs was “trying to make the painful romantic somehow”. Less than aphoristic, but Darby writes of the minutiae of living in such a quietly noble way that I feel great kinship with his poetry. Often, they feel like smiling after a long cry. Memories of his mother, the sounds of a local football game (the same one I can hear), listening in on conversations on buses. Walking alone at night. The activities that we experience when we aren’t tethered to devices. When we look up, look out, and allow ourselves to then look inward.

Poetry has been elusive for me, always. Reading poems reminded me of fishing with a handline. Expectation, persistence, resignation. Little nibbles but returning to shore with an empty bucket. I want to push the boat back to the ocean. Thankyou Mr Hudson.

Tim Rogers