'When I was a very small child,' says Editor Joe Sinclair, 'maybe two or three years old, I was given my first book, A Child's Book of Poetry or something similar.  I loved it.  It was illustrated with delightful - and occasionally terrifying - pictures.  Before I was able to read, my mother read it to me.  For a long time afterwards I pronounced the word wind as wined, in the Shakespeare verse "Blow blow thou Winter wind, Thou art not so unkind . . . " simply because my mother did not understand assonance.

'"I remember, I remember, the house where I was born/The little window where the sun came creeping in at morn . . ." by Thomas Hood was the first poem in the book, I believe.  And I had committed much of the book to memory even before I had learned to read by myself.  Thereafter it received so much handling that it eventually fell to pieces.

'i recount this story simply because one of the poems in the book was an amusing tale of how "Some little bug" was going to "get me" some day. 

'This verse returned unbidden to memory when we produced the article for this issue on allergies and I promptly Googled the title and came up with not only the entire poem, but a reference to the song versions of it'.

So we have given the full text in our Verse section, and even included a link to the You Tube version of the song performed by Bradley Kincaid around 1930 which, weirdly, may have been the year that Joe's mother purchased the book.

And significantly, more than 80 years later, Joe Sinclair has just published a volume of his own collected verse called Uncultured Pearls.

2.  Attachment

A poem by Amy Bells

A double helping of verse this issue, and both pertinent to articles appearing in this issue.

This second offering, that resonates with our main theme article on attachment, as well as two book reviews on the same subject, was discovered on the Hello Poetry website.  More information will be found in our Contributors section.