Fountain

The Fountain is a reissue of those poems from John Cassidy's booklet, The Dancing Man, which were not included in his book, An Attitude of Mind (Hutchinson, 1978). They formed part of a collection which won him the first Poet's Yearbook Award in 1977. Cassidy's poems are mostly descriptive, often portraits of people, or scenes from the natural world. Caught in sharp-edged detail, the subject is explored as the poem is shaped, so that the implicit significance of a particular observation or experience is uncovered by the defining action of the poem's language and imagery, and in the harmonising of its rhythms. The Fountain is published simultaneously with Changes of Light, a pamphlet of new poems all concerned, in various ways, with apprehensions of time; they develop ideas which Cassidy had started to explore in 'The Fountain', the title-poem of this pamphlet.