David was born in 1972 and grew up in Chesham, St Albans and Luxembourg. He graduated in Canterbury and worked for many years as a TV subtitler before becoming a personal tutor and editor, based in Hertfordshire.
He was runner-up in the Ver Poets Open in 2019 and runner-up in the Bradford on Avon competition in 2017.
I have always found David’s poetry interesting and affecting. Some of his poems bring that ‘oh gosh’ sigh deep from the stomach, such is his honesty in writing about difficult emotions.
This is a collection shaped and shot through with Van-Cauter’s grief and reflections on the illness and death of his beloved wife.
Mirror Lake is dedicated to the poet’s late wife, Julia, and variations on the theme of loss appear throughout his pamphlet, which delves deep into personal experience.
In the title poem of this accomplished and often deeply moving collection, David Van-Cauter asks ‘Were we here, or were we only passing through?’ The answer is, of course, both.
