Village of Stones is my second book of verse. It is a selection of poems written between 1985 and 2005 following my move to London. Most of the pieces are short but they show a variety of styles and subject matter and are always surprising. Well they still even surprise me sometimes and I wrote them!

I was giving a reading a while back and the MC came up to me and said "I'm going to be introducing you. What type of poetry do you write?" "All sorts really." I replied. Undeterred he went on, "Do you write love poems?" "Yes, some of my poems are about love." "So you're a romantic," he says triumphantly, believing he'd pigeon-holed me. "No, I wouldn't say that." I countered. "You mean you write love poetry but you're not a romantic." "That's right." I said. And that's how he introduced me. "This is Brian Lee. He writes love poems but he says he's not a romantic."

Yes, there are love poems in the book or rather, poems about love. There are also serious poems with a humorous twist, humorous pieces with a serious twist. There are poems about death, about nature, about life in the city. There are also salutations and memorials to a couple of my favourite poets: Vasko Popa a Serbian poet of the last century whose work is a marriage of traditional folklore and modern surrealism; and Li Ho (aka Li He), a poet of Tang dynasty China, described as a demonic genius,

While Songs for Gaia is very much of a piece, a whole which doesn't really stand being broken into chunks, each poem in Village of Stones stands for itself and is not related to any of the other pieces except maybe by recurring thematic obsessions and language games. These I will leave to the reader to spot and work out but please do not tell me about them; I have no interest in literary criticism and I'm not looking for a psychotherapist however much you may think I need one!