Poetry Through My Ages

My name is Brent Jared Dearham. I was born in a little town in South Africa. At age eleven my family made the decision to leave South Africa and move to New Zealand. Auckland is where I grew up around friends and family. Always active, I played First 15 rugby and swam at the National Championships several times. Being dyslexic made academic work a bit more challenging, but I have a good family who supported and encouraged me through my High School years. At about age 15, when we started studying Shakespeare and poetry at school, I found I had a passion for and enjoyed writing poetry. At first my poetry was based on movies I had seen. Later I started to mix in experiences and emotions I had felt. Coming from a religious family I have also written about spiritual topics and Christmas. My poetry was written at first just for myself as a challenge but as I started to do more personal writing I began to be more selective with my words and would often use words that could mean several things or hide thoughts under the main story. As I became older I found I had many experiences to write about, like travel to different countries, sporting endeavors such as swimming, rugby, rock climbing and cheerleading, adrenalin- based activities such as bungy jumping and sky diving and academic pursuits such as gaining several university qualifications. Poetry is just a hobby and I continue to write when I have the time to do so, but I became concerned that the collection of poems would get lost after losing one I wrote for my grandmother in her passing (Rewritten as “Ship Of Life”). At this time I decided to publish my work to have a copy of it forever in time. This book contains about half of the poems I’ve written and I will continue to put them onto the computer until I can publish my next book.