'But travelling in India repeatedly contrasts

The heat and dust with havens pure that in the memory last;

And so we found, with Goa’s shores so gruellingly reached,

Our blue tent now was proudly pitched by the Anjuna beach.'

 

John's poetic account of an epic overland journey

to India and back in 1973-4.

 

...night life in Amritsar,

the Tibetan community in Dharamsala,

vivid scenes in Varanasi, the Himalayas up close,

hitching the Grand Trunk Road,

Hindu culture in Puri, the deep South,

beach and jungle in Goa, getting hepatitis

and returning in disarray to the UK....

 

Having tried - unsuccessfully - to record his memories as a journal,

then as a novel, John found, one locked down morning:

 

'I don't know how it happened, but it just fell into rhyme

The first steps of a journey that had long been in my mind...'

 

The lines were:

'By the road in Blackheath only 19 years old

With autumn leaves a-gathering, three thousand miles to go...'

 

Actually it was four thousand miles to India, but no matter,

John had stumbled on the best format for the tale - which turned out to be the

'fourteener' rhyme scheme used in narrative poetry since who knows when.

 

Situations and scenes could be recalled in a vivid and economical way,

there was room for reflections, jokes and asides, and plunges into the sublime,

the touching, the profound. So the narrative got underway, with Europe left behind,

the distances of Turkey and Iran traversed, the life lessons of Afghanistan

and Pakistan recalled, and the arrival at the Indian border described:

 

'Under the bluest of blue skies, the golden cornfields swayed

While bunting, touched by gentle winds, in countless colours played...'

 

So began a series of encounters with Indian life, in Amritsar, Dharmsala, Varanasi -

and after a visit to Nepal both ecstatic and strained - a journey down

to the gentle South.Then, after finding havens in Goa and Agra,

came a gruelling journey home that ended

in an unwinding of dreams in a harsher reality.

 

So the poem's final section relates to personal rebuilding,

finding feet in a new reality, and ends on a note of

endurance and forward-movement.

 

First published as 'On the Asian Highway', republished as

'The Rime of the Asian Highway' when John realised it was in the same metre

as Coleridge's legendary poem, the book also includes poems, songs lyrics

and a short story influenced by the journey and its aftemath.

 

 Immersive, readable - and re-readable!

 

'Magnificent, wonderfully vivid and exciting' - John Carey

£2.99 as e-book

£8.95 in paperback

£12.95 in hardback (certain countries only)

 

Listen to extracts here