Pearl of the Wind: This is at root the same story and style as in my novels Black Inked Pearl and its fairytale prequel Pearl of the Seas and the more recent Helix Pearl, But this time it is told from a different perspective – that of our call to the fleeting flighting breathing air, the soul, the fluttering butterfly-psyche.

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This book was written in three magical days on a sea journey, looking out on the enchantment of clouds, sunrise and sunset, a time for the liminal in-between mystical place of dream.

No doubt there are still (I am only human) some ‘mis-writes’ and infelicities: anyway, who in this human world of ours can agree on the best style? I would be glad, however, if you could note that some, hopefully all, of the at-first-sight wrong spellings, grammar or punctuation, and the scattering of unusual words, are not typos but there for the sake of the sound and the rhythm, essential features in this dream-steeped narrative.

It is set out as prose and until I read it aloud that is how I might have described it and allowed my computer to treat it. But in fact I suspect that my unthinking unconscious, my feeling-imagination, knew better all along and had already flown the text into pulse-beaten wing-ed words. And if that, dear reader, sounds pretentious – to me too – I can only say, again, that that is how it came: I tell it as it was heard.

I think if you too read it aloud and pause to feel the sounding words and the rhythms, you too might wonder if much of it is more of poetry than of prose, and, like all poems, echo-ridden and soaked in repetition (actually I should have known this all along, for I had found the same thing in turn with all the earlier Kate-Pearl stories too; perhaps, do you think, with poetry you have to discover it afresh each time?) So when in doubt think of this as mostly a kind of poetry, and if you will be so kind, speak it aloud.

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The Poet-of-the-Aire sings the Lay of the Lady Catherineof Olden Time as heard one dawn by mortal earsin dreams and told forth as commanded mein the wing-ed words of the spirit’s breath-ed psychehere by the handmaiden Ruth in the olden breath of breathing.

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