I should be whispering this because Halloween is almost upon us. A time of Witches, Ghouls and Hauntings and all kinds of scary things that come out the evening before All Saints Day to wreak havoc... I'm glad you're listening so let us begin.

Many of us remember that feeling from childhood when an adult or even our friends would tell us scary stories of things that go bump in the night. It was a time to scare and be scared and no matter how terrifying the stories were it was a good feeling punctuated by yelps and laughs. Halloween is now firmly established in the Calendar as a favourite; to go trick or treating and an excuse for kids everywhere to dress up in outlandish attire and collect vast quantities of sweets.

Equally adults everywhere are prone to switch off the lights and pretend to be out! In our collection the poems show that words have been used to enthral and suggest dark mysterious forces beyond our control for quite some time. With authors of the ability of Keats, Poe, Byron, Sheehan & Shakespeare, to nourish these primeval fears the poems have an unsettling nature as all bad things should!

This collection of poems is read to you by Ghizela Rowe & Gideon Wagner.