Forty-Nine: Poems from a Life Still in Progress (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798251716795)

Some lives are quiet. Some are not.

Forty-Nine is a raw and unflinching poetry collection that traces one man's journey across nearly five decades - from a childhood fractured by divorce, through depression, addiction, and recovery, to the hard-won clarity of fatherhood and the daily, deliberate choice to keep going.

These forty poems do not flinch from the dark years. They speak honestly about what depression actually feels like - not sadness, but weight. About what addiction offered, and what it cost. About twenty-four years clean, and what that kind of survival really means. About drinking too much, and putting that down too.

But Forty-Nine is also a book about the world made wider - the colour and heat of Mexico, the impossible skies of Australia, the mountains of New Zealand and the silence they gave. About four children who made the surviving make sense. About the particular fear of a parent who watches the news and worries about the world he is leaving them.

And ultimately, it is a book about choosing. Not naivety. Not the greeting card version of hope. But the earned, deliberate, daily decision to face the window, open it, and let the day in.

For anyone who has carried more than they expected and kept going anyway - this book was written with you in mind.

Forty-Nine is divided into eight chapters: Roots & Rupture, The Descent, The Fire I Fed, The Wide World, What I Made, The World as It Is, Holding On, and The Long View.