From the Beginning

John O'Loughlin's first real collection of poems, written on and off during 1973-75, reflects the lyricism and formal simplicity of youth, showing the influence of poets like Rimbaud, Ezra Pound, Adrian Henri, and The Doors lead singer Jim Morrison on his formative years as a writer of, at least initially, poetic tendency, which began pleasantly enough in Merstham, Surrey, before progressing first to Finsbury Park and then to Crouch End in north London, where he got the inspiration for the poem 'Dosshouse Blues', which should intrigue those who have personal experience of solitary life in cheap lodgings. Appended to the poetry proper are a group of prose poems, a series of aphoristic observations of a light-hearted nature, four one-act plays, or playlets (two of which are straightforward dialogues), together with a couple of short stories which he wrote at about the same time as the dialogues (1976), and which have a loosely poetic quality and deserve, for stylistic reasons, to be included, along with the playlets, in this little collection of disparate literary creations, which were among the very first things the author ever wrote and are certainly the only writings to have survived from the early 1970s, when he first began to regard himself as a writer. - A Centretruths editorial