It is not easy to admit ones regrets, desires, joys and bitter-sweet memories, let alone commit them to paper. And to put these into the public domain takes yet another brave leap that can, however, lead to a therapeutic and consoling reassurance for the reader and, hopefully, a cathartic valve for the writer. However this is what Kevin Hollingsworth has achieved in his refreshingly candid collection of writings, Wonders.

The collection comprises 21 pieces, each one exploring the writer’s emotions in the face of his circumstances. In form, each piece inhabits that grey area between prose poetry and literary prose, with its intense use of language: metaphor, personification and linguistic acrobatics abound. In his use of prose, Hollingsworth has followed an established tradition, beginning, in modern times with the French Symbolist poets of the 19th century, including Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé and finding their English champions with such iconic writers as Oscar Wilde, Amy Lowell, T.S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein.

But while these writers are usually characterised by a forensic approach to language and an almost obsessional emphasis on le mot juste that carves every feeling and sensation in stone, Hollingsworth moves into more accessible areas where (for the ordinary reader) our feelings are harder to pin down in words. Of course, especially in some of the earlier pieces, he conveys the nature of his feelings through words. "Stolen Amor", "Sadness", "When She Is Not Around" and "Sapphire" express the sensations he has felt when coming face to face with his emotions. But as the series continues, specific occurrences, during which his emotions are tried, come to the fore. And here we find a human dimension to Hollingsworth’s writing, far removed from the clinical literary exercises of his predecessors. In "Eyes", for example, he grapples with finding a single element that is able to represent the awe in which he holds his loved one.

This very human dimension begs comparison with Petrach and later the tradition of Elizabethan sonnet sequences in which the subject is usually the speaker’s unhappy love for a distant beloved, following the courtly love tradition of the troubadours.

However, all this aside, what Hollingsworth has achieved is to put into words certain feelings with which we can all empathise. In "Eyes", for example, we feel for him in his search for a defining symbol of his passion. He considers ‘your hair’, ‘your lips’, ‘your lovely nose’ as elements that best encapsulate his feelings for his beloved, before settling with ‘your eyes with warmth and promise’. This transparent thought process only goes to emphasise the sincerity and raw human nature of his turmoil and allows the reader an entry point into a world of despair - and eventually hope - that can be shared and can give comfort.

Wonders is an apt title: starting from a point of sadness it manages to make us see anew, in wonderment, the world around us.