D.J. Enright writes: Edwin Mason was born in Warwick in 1926, and read English at Downing College, Cambridge. He published books on teaching methods and became Reader in Urban Education at Sussex University. Ill health forced him to retire early, and he moved to Spain. An exhibition of his art work was held in Sussex University in 1992, the year in which he died, back in Warwick.

The following sonnets come from a sequence of forty poems entitled Cop's Body, Urquhart's euphemism for 'God's body' in translating Rabelais's euphemism, 'Vertus guoy' (Vertu Dieu). The words open Panurge's declaration that he drowns, perishes, and wanders astray when he considers 'the profound abyss of this world'. Varying in language between the demotic and the formal, the sequence is a self-exploratory though not self-justifying account, addressed to God, of the pleasures, pains and failures arising during a restless voyage through the years.
* * *

1.
The tide of sadness sweeps across my life
again, like rainsheets, shortening my sight
and clouding reason foggily as if
the cosmos is condensing into night.
Old-fashioned images invest the mind,
ghosts of the dead days when the optimist
I used to be, devoured down to the rind
every bright vision. Mornings lost in mist

drift in now from spaces beyond reach,
wrecking the trawls of sense as, half-seas-over,
my hulk lies sandlogged on this foreign beach,
the final dereliction of the rover.
Empty. Empty the hands, empty the sky.
...