Patricia Hann

Voyaging Through Time Patricia Hann

This poetry collection presents a patchy record of an almost hundred-

year-long life as it was lived until Covid 19 came into view. There

is no mention of World War 2, which I lived through mainly as an

evacuee and wrote about only in letters, and there is no mention of

Covid in the poems, only one of which was written later than 2018.

But, reading through what I have written over the years, I can almost

catch a sense of the pandemic waiting in the wings. The growing

experience of crowding everywhere, the mass production methods

of stock rearing, the human crowding out of wildlife, plant and

animal, and the prospect cheerily propounded by extreme technology

of emigration to another planet when depletion and pollution will

have rendered this one uninhabitable - all this was making for an

unhealthy state of things. At the same time, I am not one to underrate

the many benefits we enjoy from our advanced technology, as well

for some of the changes it has brought to our way of living as for the

enlargement of our understanding both of the world we live in and of

what may be beyond. But the first function of poetry is to entertain,

and I hope there are poems here that will do that.