Poetry begins in the gaze. It invites you into its vertigo.
 
It reminds you that doubts and certainties share the same incandescence. It takes you where only your heartbeat echoes.
 
It fills your eyes with wonder.
 
It recognises your light when it is a root. Your voice when it is not your echo.
 
It knows how to hold onto your drifting or untangle your burdens.
 
It revs the most unbreakable engine when you reach the crossroads.
 
It is as much as never and always, and in every chance encounter it will listen.
 
A short poetic biography
 
It was the photographs of the tent in the heart of Cazorla and the white Seat 128, the Pentax pictures, the Kodak colours, "we do the rest", the roads and straw bales at national rally championships, the incredulous boy sitting on Aspar's motorcycle.
 
And after every trip, reliving the adventure: setting up the equipment, untangling cables, switching on the slide projector and hearing each photograph click past. Sunday afternoons at home, trembling light on the screen, memories, rescuing time as it passed.
 
I already had the impulse, the meaning of looking. All of it grew inside me. Years later came my escapes and returns. I changed places and views, wanting to drift, determined to capture that same light. The veiled light that always accompanies memories.
 
Then came the first second-hand SLR, basic manuals in a library near the sea, toy cameras, old Polaroids and the Nikon I rescued from the rubbish, cheap film bought three rolls at a time, waiting outside processing shops, matte please, 7 × 10, thank you, in under an hour, an introductory darkroom course, pressing the button without thinking, companionship, shooting from the heart, journals and meaning.
 
Times changed, nomadic ideas grew and notebooks overflowed each year. Yet even today, still and more than ever, the impulse remains to return to the warmth of that light.