Sixty is a collection of Richard Brooker’s poetry gathered in 2018 and initially shared only on social media. It might have stayed in the shadows without the vision of Paul O’Sullivan, who conceived of joining Richard’s poetry with images to create a work of visual beauty that opens the door to Richard’s writing. The selection of photographs Paul has curated trigger conversations that Richard’s poetry takes up, with wit, humour and warmth mirrored between images and words.

The unifying theme of Sixty is “life in poetry, poetry in life”, and the poems are drawn from near a lifetime of reflecting experience into words. Those experiences follow the evolving chapters of life and touch on many of things that life brings to us all, from the everyday to moments of deeper introspection. Like earlier privately distributed collections, such as On the Shore of a New World and Sardines, in Sixty Richard explores the threads of people, place, and insight that touch us all. 

Richard has explored many poetic forms over the decades, and Sixty includes free verse and structured poetic forms, in particular Haiku. Haiku offers the opportunity to distil into a few words the essence of a moment, scene or thought. Through his “Life in One Breath” tour, Richard is taking the history of Haiku on the road, as an introduction to his own Haiku and other poetry.