It began, in one instance, with a question that refused to go away.
Jayne, a training manager at a solicitors’ firm where Adrian W. Church worked, kept being asked what she did when she was not training. Church, who was also involved in professional training, saw the comic potential. The result was “The Burning Issue”, a poem built around the apparently urgent mystery of what a trainer does when a trainer is not training.
It is an unlikely beginning for a poetry collection, but an appropriate one for Frivolous Verse and Multifarious Observations. Church’s subjects rarely arrive because they look conventionally poetic. They arrive because something happens, somebody says something memorable, a place catches his attention, or life gives him something worth thinking about.
First Came the Office, Weddings and Travel Mishaps
The earliest poems were written for colleagues, birthdays, office events and special occasions, often by hand in the days before word-processing. Church describes them as light-hearted pieces intended primarily for fun.
Looking through Part One is a little like opening a drawer of old stories.
A bride’s dilemma over choosing a bridesmaid becomes two poems. A friend’s unfortunate experience with food on holiday inspires “Bally Bali”. Even Church’s professional connection with wills finds its comic counterpart in “Where There’s a Will”.
The humour works because the situations come from recognisable life rather than invented comic premises. Someone had a problem. Someone went on holiday. Someone said something at work. Church noticed.
Then the collection changes.
Life Becomes Harder to Laugh Off
Multifarious Observations opens on much more personal ground. Church explains that these later poems were written to express his feelings about events in his life, including his experience of depression and his gratitude towards the friends who helped him through it.
“A Message for My Friends” grew from a period when he feared that friends might see him differently after a serious episode. They did not. “Dark and Light” addresses the highs and lows of depression more directly.
Suddenly, the observational habit that once found humour in an office question is being used for something more demanding: trying to understand what happens inside a person when life becomes difficult.
People Keep Expanding the Subject Matter
Friendship leads naturally into family, celebrations and remembrance.
Church writes for weddings, christenings, birthdays and births. “A New Life” was composed in a hotel room in Rome while he awaited the birth of a child in his extended family.
Dogs enter the collection too, not as decorative pets but as companions. Clyde, an Old English Sheepdog, is remembered as an exceptionally gentle and loving presence, while Dylan, a Cockerpoo, reminds Church strongly of him despite being a completely different breed.
By this point, the book has travelled a long way from office humour without ever really changing its method. Church is still responding to what catches his attention and what matters to him.
Age Adds Another Lens
Later poems increasingly look backwards.
In “Fond Memories”, Church recalls travelling, talking late into the night and the people who made earlier years bright. Memory does not return in neat chronological order. A word, a smile or a scent can bring an entire person back into view.
Ageing itself becomes material. One poem follows life from childhood curiosity through work and learning into old age, where each remaining day carries greater value because more years now lie behind than ahead.
The subject has shifted again, but not unnaturally. The poet who once noticed what people said at work is now noticing what time does to memory.
The World Outside Keeps Entering the Poems
Church’s interests eventually widen far beyond his immediate circle.
The COVID years produce poems about isolation, the Rule of Six, Christmas and the strangeness of living through a pandemic. A childhood stream inspires nostalgia after development changes its landscape. A return to Weston-super-Mare recalls family holidays. His seventieth birthday becomes inseparable from the news of Queen Elizabeth II’s death.
Travel pushes the range further still. A 2025 visit to Istanbul and Göbekli Tepe prompts poems about civilisation, history and what ancient places can tell us about humanity.
Seen as a whole, Frivolous Verse and Multifarious Observations is less a collection about many unrelated subjects than a record of one person continuing to notice things. Offices, friends, depression, dogs, birthdays, childhood, history, ageing, pandemics and ancient cities all become possible material.
The subjects change because life changes. Church simply keeps watching.
Discover how Church’s observations turn into beautiful verses; grab your copy now.
