The Stars Beyond Me

A powerful poetic journey across mountains and islands, through loss and love, toward meaning.

The Stars Beyond Me spans three decades of lived experience-from rock faces and glaciers to hospital rooms and Mediterranean light. What begins in the high mountains as a celebration of landscape and mountaineering gradually deepens into a meditation on memory, mortality, and the search for meaning.

The early poems are rooted in climbing and ski-mountaineering: in the Lake District and Scotland, in the Alps, and on expeditions to the Andes and the Himalaya. These are poems of wind, ice, judgement, and the fellowship of the rope-where beauty is inseparable from risk, and where confronting danger brings mortality sharply into view.

Then life turns.

The illness and death of the poet's first wife transform outward adventure into moral trial. A promise made in fear becomes a defining act of love. The poems move from summits to hospital rooms, from physical exposure to emotional reckoning, exploring responsibility, devotion, and the limits of control.

Out of loss comes unexpected renewal: a meeting on a Greek island, the return of love, and a life reshaped in luminous Mediterranean light. Yet even this is tempered by a later incurable illness, bringing the sequence full circle-back to the question first asked in a northern valley: what more could there be than natural beauty?

Personal yet universal, grounded in real landscapes yet reaching beyond them, The Stars Beyond Me is a poetic memoir of mountaineering, memory, love, and acceptance. It traces a journey from ambition to perspective, from outward risk to the quiet courage required when mastery is no longer possible.

It ends beneath the quiet radiance of the night sky-suggesting that what endures is love.