Originally from Wrexham, North Wales, David Lightfoot read Classics at the University of Wales before beginning a teaching career in Chester, Liverpool, Boston, Louth and finally Lincoln. He is now living in Market Rasen but started writing full-time following early retirement, publishing Winterman’s Company about the Lincoln Imp in 1996. In 1994 he founded and co-edited the poetry magazine Seam and has been publishing poetry in anthologies and in other poetry magazines along with prose.
“A master of form and technique, he writes with intelligence, insight, humour and bite.” - Rob Etty.
Intermittent Faults: poems from a journal is available online.
The Lincolnshire Poetry collection is currently available to view on an appointment only basis. Please contact the Special Collections Librarian for more information and to discuss your research requirements.
Search the Special Collection catalogue by an individual poet’s name or using the word poetry.
Some think at death our bodies go,
dissolved, to join the cosmic flow
and that in this sense we survive-
no longer selves but still alive.
Others are sure we cease to be
just as a knot, when carelessly
untied, leaves no trace on the string
of ever having been something.
But no knot ever tied itself
and string can lie upon a shelf,
unused for years until one day
the gardener decides it may
support a climbing rose and ties
it in a knot again. The size
of both its bows is just the same,
because his love of knots can name
innumerable sorts and ply
their twists and loops at will and by
his knowledge of the way they fold
make new knots better than the old.
From Wounds Heal, Rockingham Press, 1996.
