The Street

For those who love poetry, David R.A Pearce has written a unique, beautiful, and impressive collection of sonnets (103 in all) and other poems in ‘The Street.’ The poems, together, form a very personal and honest account of a challenging and interesting period in his life. ‘The Street’, off Whitstable, Kent, is an enticing narrow promontory of shingle, shell and pudding-stone extending some mile, or mile and a half, into the sea. It is completely covered at high tide, with rising waters encroaching from both sides. One has to be careful not to be cut off. David Pearce ‘The Street’ is in itself a metaphor because the author is being cut off. He has been diagnosed as having terminal cancer, and the writing of these poems, mostly in the last two years, has been a therapy for him - and, so far a successful therapy. He hopes that the poems may be an encouragement and pleasure to others just as they have been for him. Pearce was born in Whitstable in 1938. That Kentish coastline was, in the early war years, under threat; and for a while, as a small child, he was an evacuee in Cornwall. After school at St Edmund’s, Canterbury, and then at Oxford University, he taught at Stanbridge Earls, Hampshire, and then, for thirty-three years at Berkhamsted School where he was Head of English and a boarding housemaster. He was a joint-founder of the Graham Greene Birthplace Trust, and, through that, rejoices in friends all round the world. The importance of his family life and other interests may be deduced from the poems.