Mountain on Top of a Mountain: One-Strike Poems 1980-2023

While editors and publishers in the past have always described my short form poems as haiku, I prefer to call the majority of the short form poems of the type in this collection as One-strike Poems, since the term 'haiku' relates to a very different cultural and historical mind-set and developmental literary process. And long before my awareness of haiku, the source of my short form poems came originally from my interest in the chants and prayers of indigenous peoples, and then later, graffiti on the walls of the various cities I either lived in or visited. Resulting in my early poems often being of an aphoristic or epigrammatic nature.

My poems at this time were also sourced in my encounters with an object or event, when a poem might immediately and spontaneously arise out of the experience and be committed, just as it is, to any piece of paper to hand, in that moment. And in the few instances where any change was made afterwards, it was only in the moving of a word or two from one line to another, or on very rare occasions, perhaps the changing of a single word.

(Malcolm Ritchie)

Comments on previous publications

"Malcolm Ritchie's poems have a subtle life-enhancing tone which I would have thought was rare in most publishers' lists...Finely turned nature poetry - witty, and always with a sharp, unexpected twist...Tapestries of linguistic miracles; wryly celebratory and delightful... Some real gems; little masterpieces." -Heathcote Williams

"... small lines on the great earth, Ritchie's 2014 collection of deft short poems that illuminate his life in Japan and on Arran... Like their Japanese antecedents, they contain much humour, considerable insight and a deftness of touch that brings the most everyday words to vivid life. These poems are of the process." -Billy Mills

Malcolm Ritchie was born in London, in 1940. He spent his childhood in Scotland, where he received his early education. In later years he moved to Cornwall, and attended art school there. Since then he has travelled widely and has lived in Wales, London, California, New York, and for nearly 10 years in Japan. After some years on the Isle of Arran, he is now once again living in Cornwall.