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Donald Ward was born in Belmont, Surrey in 1909, but lived virtually his entire life in Kent, the county that he loved and inspiration for much of his poetry. He left school at 14 and took a job working for the Post Office.

   A committed Christian and lay preacher, Donald was an unequivocal pacifist and in 1939 registered as a conscientious objector. He sold Peace News on the streets of London in the late thirties and during the early war years, stoically suffering the abuse of those citizens who did not share his beliefs. Throughout the blitz he was a postman during the day and member of the Heavy Rescue Brigade at night.

   After the war he was a member of CND. One of the fondest memories of John Ward, one of Donald’s four children with his wife Kathleen, was being taken to Hyde Park Corner on a bright spring morning in the late 1950s “to hear Donald Soper, full of wit and charm and endless patience, expose the folly of our Cold War politicians.” He was at the end of his life as staunch a pacifist as ever. He died on 15th February 2003, the day on which over a million people attended an anti-war march in London - a march which Donald would have attended had it been at all possible.

   Donald retired from the Post Office in 1972, after nearly 50 years in the Inland section. He now had the time to devote to interests such as solo bicycling holidays in England and abroad, the study of nature (he was a member of Orpington Field Club for many years) and following Cray Wanderers football club.

   His retirement also allowed him the necessary freedom to develop his writing of poetry. His themes were largely traditional - human relationships, religious meditation and, above all, the natural world. These he treated with a fine lyrical gift, often enlivened by striking and unconventional imagery. At first glance familiar, Ward’s landscapes, animals and people become both strange and more real through his intensity of perception.

A first book of his poems, The Dead Snake (Allison & Busby), appeared in 1971 to much acclaim, including an Arts Council Award. Subsequent books - Border Country (Anvil, 1981 ), Lark Over Stone Walls (Hippopotamus, 1993), and a Collected Poems (1995) and Selected Poems 1956 - 1996 both from University of Salzburg Press - appeared over the next thirty years, as well as a number of pamphlets such as A Few Rooks Circling Trees from Mandeville Press and, most recently, several from Peglet Press. Donald’s final book collection, Adonis Blue, has just been published by Anvil Press. Featuring poems drawn from many years of writing, Adonis Blue includes work written as recently as August 2002, showing that he was writing as strongly as ever towards the end of his life.