Forgotten Ground Regained
Michael R. Collings is a poet, science fiction and fantasy author, and former professor of creative writing and literature at Pepperdine University. He became interested in alliterative verse his senior year in high school, when the class was introduced to Beowulf, in modern English with a few lines of Anglo-Saxon included as examples of the verse form. As a senior English major in college, he took a course in pre-Chaucerian English verse, followed by a directed studies in Anglo-Saxon as language. His term project was a translation in to modern alliterative verse of Brunanburh. A short time later, while on a two-year mission, he wrote a 100+line alliterative religious poem. Since them--now some 50 years ago--he has consciously explored dozens of verse forms incorporating repetitive sounds ranging to alliteration to full rhyme.
Some of his alliterative poems appear in Dennis Wise's critical anthology of modern alliterative verse, including:
- Riddle
- Grendel’s Mother
- DCCXCIII—A Fragment
They were originally published in his book, Dark Designs: Forms and Fantasies, a defense of formal poetry with illustrations of a broad variety of forms in a speculative fiction context.
He has also written an alliterative verse translation of the Old English poem, The Battle of Brunanburh.
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