"with beest wishes from Eversley Belfield, Sark, October 1985"
Eversley Michael Gallimore Belfield 40pp, brief biography, author's portrait to front cover: author was WW2 artillery officer & pilot, lived in Winchester for 28 years and here presents unpublished poems hat reflect his personal re-action to the horror of war; thin card covers




In 1983, living in retirement on the island of Alderney, Eversley Belfield decided to reprint his poems that he had written between 1937 and 1944, recounting his experiences in the Royal Artillery and the Royal Air Force. The front cover of his book, entitled "40 Poems", showed a photograph of him, handsome in his airman's uniform.

Mr Belfield reflected that his quest to become a published poet had ultimately been abortive, but that he had nevertheless enjoyed the experience of trying to write in poetry mode. To me, his work is prose narrative that is set out in lines on the page, giving it the look of a poem, and I would guess that the main appeal of his book today would probably be that it is, in effect, an entertaining personal diary of his time serving his country in the forces. In the run-up to the marking of the 60th anniversary of D-Day in June 2004, all of the national newspapers have been featuring the memories of veterans who took part in the Normandy invasion. In the Guernsey local newspapers I saw some interviews of this nature, and for all I know, Mr Belfield's poems might have been re-aired. One of his last poems, dated October 1944, began:

We anchored on the Normandy beaches ...