The Hill

The seventh in the Retrospective Voyages Series featuring the early work of Trevor Maynard, the year is 1983.

Retrospective Voyages

This is my journey; however, it is also a human journey, and therefore some ideas, concepts, truths, with resonate with others - we all form, grow, and become: we all age, question, and love.

The Hill

For me, 1983 was a pivotal year in many ways. As I exited my teenage years and joined the workforce, my mind leapt into creative overdrive as if the slide to 'normal life' was a clarion call to write poetry.

Romantically, if young men can differentiate love from lust, I began to explore imagery and metaphor more, while masking my struggles with social interaction through a not-so-healthy dose of self-medication. Alcohol was to be imbibed, oats were to be sown, and life was to be lived dangerously.

On the one hand, Lord Byron was an influence, 'mad, bad, and dangerous to know', on the other, I was a filing clerk - but then Einstein was a 'filing clerk'. Then there was Douglas Adams, seminal science-fiction surrealist and truly an iconic messiah of the answer to life, the universe and everything. My mind swirled.

I was growing up, not just fearing the mass destruction that seemed imminent because of the Cold War, but getting angry about it, wanting to do something about it. This was a time in which I cemented in my own mind, the idea of POET as a vocation, when I began to see through societal pretence, through the CHATTER, and called out the establishment, FOOLS.

However, I was really in the foothills of combat here, probably having only just identified the hill I was going to need to climb. As Oscar Wilde would have it, I may be in the gutter, but I am looking up at the stars. The mundanity of work, the power of the bland, the stifling of imagination, still had me, I was its SERVANT and I was flailing, struggling, not making it up the hill. But there was GROWTH - I grew in relationships, as a group my Civil Service colleagues moulded into weekend party animals, I moved into a flat, I found a best-friend, I watched a lot of films, I got into kitchen-sink drama, social realism, French New Wave. Performances stood out, Michael Caine, Hywel Bennett, Glenda Jackson, Leslie Caron in the L-Shaped Room, and in 1965, THE HILL, Sean Connery This film was a visceral society commentary, and fed into my developing tortured poetry persona, and a growing interest in psychology and the human condition.

Reviews - My latest contemporary collection Three Score (2024)

"Three Score is one of the finest collection of poems by Trevor Maynard that addresses the many crises of our times. The poet explores his relationship with country, society, his family, his psyche and takes us with him into the tunnels of thought we ourselves have experienced and can relate to. He gives expression to the doubts, the skepticism, the unraveling of established structures in powerful poetic form, as an individual with collective awareness."


Reviews - Retrospective Voyages

in the shadow of
"The collection is also infused with a surreal quality, echoing the post apocalyptic Milliganesque humour of "The Bed Sitting Room", while also developing lyrical free verse full of rhythmic highs. Romantic, surreal, and fascinating free verse charting the rise of a poet against social unrest and universal angst."

The Dreamer Wakes
"What struck me was the variety and the off-beat conversation flow of the poems, and the pervasive cynicism and fear that seemed to underly them; nuclear war seems a real possibility in the writer's mind."

States of Being
"Free flowing imagination which are at times are surreal, and yet, told in narratives and dialogue that are earthy and matter of fact, while at other times teenage angst is given full reign"