The point about poetry, my father used to say, is that you can't pretend. It has to come from the heart, in the same way that a painting reflects your own colours, dictated by your own emotions. It talks about something rational but has to include the warmth of your personal feelings as well as the intensity of rhyme and metre to make it work. Reading Yeats' poetry systematically for the first time I was looking for a relationship with a young woman, leading to the birth of a son brought up by another woman as her own.

Tim Wilkinson was born in Liverpool in 1951 and was educated at Merchant Taylorsa School, Crosby, then at Robert Gordona s College in Aberdeen. After graduating with an M.A. (Hons) in English at Aberdeen University, he then spent his entire career teaching English at Cults Academy. He has now retired to rural Aberdeenshire. He has written two histories of his local cricket club, Banchory C.C., for whom he has played for over 50 years. Tim suffers from the incurable disease of book collecting and has amassed a collection of over 3,000 first editions. Make that 3,001.