Richard Hammersley is a health psychologist who had a long university career and still practices from his family home in the Scottish Borders. He has been writing poetry since he was 13, in parallel with his academic career, which took him to the USA and Canada and then to various universities in Scotland, England and Wales. He has published and performed in various places over the years, occasionally even getting paid, and he has never stopped writing. This book is his selected poems. Are they ‘psychological’? You decide.
The poems are dry, accessible and sometimes funny. They are often about when things go slightly, or seriously, wrong, but are also about love and values, as well as about politics and policies. The book includes Borders which contains poems about place and nature written living in the Scottish Borders. Haiku, mostly written just before and during the Covid-19 pandemic and The Fear of Winter which is a long poem sequence about social collapse.