READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

Last Thursday's posting, an account of Max Richards’ (1937-2016) and John Barnes’ visit to the poet Dimitris Tsaloumas, has a footnote. In a separate file this morning I found ‘Two Seniors’, a poem about this period of visits. It makes sense of the line in Max’s anecdotes in ‘share 1’ about ‘Two Seniors’. "Tercet-constructing Max" is how poet friend Bill Wootton describes him in 'Maxless', a eulogy posted on the 4th of October on Facebook. Here are the tercets at work, also what Bill calls his "measured lopes / of goodwill or gentle enquiry".    Two Seniors       (Judith Rodriguez, b.1936,                               Dimitris Tsaloumas, b.1921) Vigorous poems she wrote – ditto her body language. She roused her students – all can be creative! New then to her countr...

When Max Richards (1937-2016) moved from Ruffey Lake Park in 2012 he gave into my care a large part of his extensive library. Religion and Spirituality went to the Carmelite Library in Middle Park, while Literature found its way to our place, onto Ikea shelves supplied by Max himself. We managed. The riches of his library included the cuttings of articles, reviews, letters, lecture notes &c. appropriate to that book, dating from the fifties onwards. Sometimes his books double in size from all the additions, each one dated by Max. Max was a genuine collector of every kind of knowledge and equally an astounding sharer of newly discovered knowledge. This translated into the current age, where email in particular served to spread the knowledge to anyone he thought might find an interest. Links to articles, reports of visits, poem of the day, he was irrepressible. His last email to me was at the Library on the day before he died, an article he thought would attract my interest on Kh...