Ffenestri

by Mike Lansdown

Ffenestri is the Welsh word for windows - a fitting name, I believe, for a collection of my poems. The name reflects both my Welsh heritage and the fact that poetry, like windows, affords us a variety of views of the world we live in. What we see from a window depends very much on its shape and size, on the location of the building, on the season, time of day, and so on, and also on our own mood and frame of mind at the time. In a similar way, poetry allows us to see human experiences - whether they be mundane or exceptional - in a different light, to reframe events that shape our lives and to express them in other, sometimes unexpected, ways.At the back of the book, I have included some brief notes on the inspiration or reasons for each of the poems, something I found enlightening in Round and Around, a poetry collection penned by my friend and fellow Watford Writer, Ian Welland. I have tried to place pieces with similar themes or ideas near each other, but have not forced this, meaning that the order of the poems is fairly arbitrary and so can be read in any order.