Anthology including guest contributors: Tim Page, Colin Wilson, Kit Wright, and Joy Walsh

Foreword by the Governor

It should surprise no one that a book of creative writings has been produced in a prison. Men taken aside from the community and separated from their ordinary emotional outlets will often find release through writing. There can be no better time to confront one's own personality and to reflect upon the world and the precarious place which we hold in it.

It is no less true that those of us who work in prisons are confronted daily by moral problems which remain in the realm of theory for most people. We too may seek to express our doubts and concerns by setting them down on paper.

We are grateful to Alexis Lykiard for guiding our novice pens with great patience and for enabling us to share the company of those professional artists he introduced to us.

A final hope is that the reader will enjoy the work and through it gain some insight into the unusual world which for us is commonplace. Perhaps Housman expressed it most clearly:

" Tis true, the stuff I bring for sale
Is not so brisk a brew as ale:
Out of a stem that scored the hand
I wrung it in a weary land."

(A Shropshire Lad)

Graham Clark