Biography and Author's Note

There are always two biographies. There is the biography of time and place and previous publication -which is valid, and in this connection, I would have to cite Ireland and Flanders (the Flemish speaking area of Belgium) where I live. In this connection, the publications would be listed and named and the whole given over as an introduction to the present work. A more interesting situation however, and this is the true biography, arises when you consider the internal development that occurs as the mind moves from the first fledgling attempts to speak in verse and then moves forward and backwards between its own vision and occasionally coming to rest on those node of tradition which it finds illumines the ever ongoing search for an authentic statement.

Such is the case with the present work. It stands on its own yet also forms part of that movement which is essential to my work as poet and playwright. I have done versions of Dante and Ovid, I have reshaped two plays of Shakespeare so as to arrive at a personal truth. I have reworked the I Ching and other texts so as to make those texts my own and offer them to the reader as the true inner workings of a mind that delights in what I have elsewhere called "The Old Renewal"

It is within such a process that the text of Gilgamesh was attempted. I wanted/needed to make it my own, to wrestle it from out the hands of those who have done excellent versions (and this is not to be thought as a replacement for them) and speak of it in my own voice.

This is a process which in one way or another is an ongoing fact of verse. This is not specific nor unique to myself. What is specific (and this is its value) is that within the biography of the mind Gilgamesh has long occupied a central place and the present utterance is an attempt to present the work as the expressing of a mind encountering tradition and being enlightened by it.

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