ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Cliff Fell’s second collection of poems, Beauty of the Badlands, was published by VUP in 2008.
‘Of ‘People are everywhere breaking into blossom’ he says: ‘This was written in one sitting, late in October, while watching cherry blossoms fall on people passing along the street outside my workplace window. While I recognised almost immediately that the title line, the poem’s first impulse, was drawn from my memory of James Wright’sfine poem, ‘The Blessing’, I think now that the giddy optimism underpinning these lines really came from my growing anticipation that Barack Obama was soon to be elected to the White House, and my sense that we were on the cusp of a moment of hope and light.’