INFLUENCE OF THE SEA

GB’s single strongest poetic inspiration, he says, is the sea; his poetry makes frequent use of sea

images, and we can hear the sounds of surf and the cries of seagulls in some of his best writing. He

greatly admires the work of such poets as early Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas and Ted Hughes, as well as that of romantics such as Whitman, Poe, Keats and Shelley. He has also been strongly influenced

by the bold colours and rhythms of Anglo-Saxon verse. Yet GB has a powerful, modern voice of his own.

RECENT POETRY PRIZES

In 1998, GB won two further awards, third prize in the prestigious Arvon Foundation International

Poetry Competition (See photo above)(with poem in the The Daily Telegraph anthology of winners ‘The Ring of Words’), and second prize in the Manchester Poets 20th Anniversary Open Poetry Competition. In 199, he won fourth prize in the Cardiff International Poetry Competition. He was also    a runner-up in the Redbeck Press Poetry Competition. His poems appear also in an EFL Poetry Anthology (199). In 2010 he was short-listed in the Strokestown International Poetry Competition and gave a reading at the Strokestown Poetry Festival in Ireland.

VARIOUS OTHER WORKS

Having lived in Japan since 1969, he has absorbed much of the delicate flavour of oriental art. With his wife Kyoko, he has published translations of the best-selling poems and essays of the paraplegic poet/

painter Tomihiro Hoshino – ‘Journey of the Wind’ (1988) and ‘Road of the Tinkling Bell’ (1990, now out of print but GB can supply a few copies). These translations have been reprinted in Japan sixteen times so far. In September 1994, GB read excerpts of Hoshino’s work in the Carnegie Hall, New York.

He attended the 16th World Congress of Poets in Maebashi, Japan, in August 1996, as a workshop speaker (Poetry in the Hi-Tech Age) and as a reciter. He published a critical work – ‘Pioneers of English Poetry’ (Kinseido, Tokyo) in 1980, and has also published some dozen books of essays on a wide variety of subjects (as university textbooks in Japan).