Finding help and facing up to the challenges presented by any confrontation with addictive processes is of itself a huge challenge. There is so much information 'out there' that it is sometimes difficult to begin and the very nature of the challenges, despite all the information, can feel lonely and alienating.This little book is designed to help you simply START the process, by presenting perspectives and ways of exploring that don't make you feel as if you need an academic background to participate. It is a book to provide you with ways of reflecting on the challenges that encourage further exploration; further research and ultimately engagement with living- in a better, healthier way. Although written in simple words, I have done so in a way that hopefully encourages deep reflection;as the language may be simple, but each phrase could be a chapter, or indeed a book in itself.I thought deeply how best to convey my insights of over 25 years, in both terms of highs and lows and was tempted by many approaches.To offer something a little different required a trust in the value of the heart in explaining the gut-wrenching reality and descriptions of experience in this area of life. It was hard to not honour all my clients and fellow travellers by including descriptions of each and every one of their personal epiphanies and struggles. I hope that my distillation of what they taught me and now offer to you, honours them in the wider sphere and that their journeys signified help simplify and inform yours. The reflections are my subjective distillation of millions of words, rivers of tears and gales of laughter lived and worked during this period of my life. May it give someone the hope and motivation necessary to allow miracles to occur; such as I have witnessed and now share with you. I also write about a fundemental change that I believe (and many others do too), that has to occur if Western society is to mature and not continually degrade and decay. That change necessary, is for society to "own" its collusion in the continuing development and maintenance of addictive processes.we need to step away from the 'blame game' and consider our societal relationships with all forms of addictive processes, before we end up, like un- conscious addicts, in a bondage from which escape becomes increasingly problematic. Then who will we blame and scapegoat? When all is said and done, ASK is about the power and scope of hope. I hope it helps you.

This landmark Collected Poems from one of Britain's major post-war poets, gathers together work from over four decades, and includes previously unpublished material that has remained outside the scope of Chaloner's major collections. In drawing the book together, Chaloner has updated and revised poems into a thematic whole, a decision supported by the remarkable consistency of vision, inquiry and purpose in his work. What we have is a magnum opus, a chronological sweep through Britain's dynamic and troubled reinvention from the Sixties to the present day extending his range from the intimate and local to the social and global. Chaloner's personal battleground is the truth, but his writing is a triumph of poise and tone. His is primarily a poetry of sensibility, and we are accompanied rather than addressed, encouraged rather than admonished. From the early ruralist poems of wry, intimate observation to the recent critical visions of the Twenty-first Century world, Chaloner's focus remains undaunted, locating us in the here and now, with our eyes faced forward on to the future, a future we are all responsible for and into which we must all travel.

This major international anthology provides students and the general reader with an invaluable introduction to contemporary modernist poetry. Containing over thirty poets from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and USA, this selection offers a powerful vision of late-Twentieth-century poetic achievement: international, politically- and socially-engaged, and radical in imaginative vision and practice. It celebrates risk, resistance, protest and diversity within poetry, reaching across national and cultural boundaries. Vanishing Points provides students of Creative Writing, Cultural Studies, English and American Studies, as well as the general reader, with an important survey of modernist poetry at the start of the new millennium. * A unique introduction to the wide range of modernist experiment in contemporary poetry * Ideal study aid for students of poetry and poetics * Broad, international selection of acclaimed modernist poets * Substantial contributions offer important insights into the range of each poet's work From the Introduction: The vanishing point lies beyond the horizon established by ruling conventions, it is where the imagination takes over from the understanding. Most anthologies of contemporary verse are filled with poems that do not cross that dividing-line, but our contention is that many poems in this volume are situated on the threshold of conventional sense-making. They go beyond the perspective of accepted canons of taste and judgement and ask questions about where they belong, and who they are meant for, often combining the pathos of estrangement with the irascibility of the refusenik. All anthologies enter the world fully aware of their genealogy, of where they fit in, of how they relate to certain traditions of writing by affiliation or rejection. This combination of dependent and independent gestures is inevitable, particularly in the case of selections of work aligned with national or regional versions of literary history. The present anthology does not fall into that category; its international reach does not, however, bring exemption from the dilemma of wanting to stand apart from conditions of rivalry while also needing to claim a special value in comparison with publications already available.