Upon hearing Martin Challiss poetry for the first time I started singing. His words are beautiful they evoke wonderful imagery in my head and inspire me to write melodies - a true gift! His words were the inspiration for my first album with my trio elixir and are still some of my very favourite words to sing.

The poet Denise Levertov once said: Insofar as poetry has a social function, it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock. For me, reading Martins poems wakes me up, again and again, to the gifts of humility, wonder and paying attention.

I wonder if the name Martin from the name Mars could not be much further off ? Oh But Yes! For he is a Warrior of the Heart! In our world of striving for achievement, for excelling, for doing, for measuring ourselves against this expression of our Yang... Where is the still simple place of knowing of being rather than doing? Through his poems the edges, the far shore, the liminal perhaps it will not be so much further off .