Author Description

Nick Ware grew up in Surrey and still maintains an affinity with chalk downland. He was educated in West Byfleet and Woking and attended Westminster College, Oxford. After almost six years and various teaching appointments in and around Wiltshire, he relocated to Exeter and taught there. He left full-time teaching in 2017 and – after several years delivering prescriptions for local pharmacies – works, now, with young adults who are visually impaired.<br/><br/>His latest volume of poetry, Becoming Prospero, treads the line between how things are and how they could be, reflecting thoughtfully on the narratives offered and the redemptive prospect of some alternative visions. Environmental uncertainty, social injustice and war in Ukraine and Gaza afford the troubling background to these compositions, although they address much else. Observations of the natural world sit alongside others concerned with human behaviour and interaction while allusions to The Tempest reference how – in telling their story – individuals interpret and manage experience. The collection includes material inspired in or after visiting New Zealand in December, 2023, and – in Hypothetical, the sequence of unrhymed sonnets addressed to Nick’s dead brother – “the premise of an interview/with one who’s seen things from the other side”. Questioning and vulnerable in its honesty, Becoming Prospero negotiates “this intricate/and confusing maze/of sound and sense and sight”, showing awareness of “the evident caprice” yet celebrating<br/><br/>“the state of uplift caught when it happened –<br/>thereafter, spoken of with wonderment.”