Inside Stories: Poems for a Troubled Age

Release day 7th May 2026

The poems in this book are attempts to imagine our inner lives – the part of our lives which is most evident to ourselves but often least evident to others. Some of them are directly about the person I imagine myself to be. But most, on the face of it, are about others. I’m aware that all perception is shot through with assumptions, values and prejudices as well as glimmers of self-transcending insight. The act of imagining isn’t a mirror but a lens. Yet I feel that imagining through the lens of ourselves is something we are all doing in every waking moment of our lives as well as in our dreams. Dreaming is anyway the background music of thinking. We refract reality in the attempt to get at it.

The whole collection sprang from the first poem in the book, ‘Special Needs’. I met a fearsome-looking but gentle-voiced man who had, like myself, grown up in the South Wales valleys. Unlike me, however, he had lived in his hometown all his life. He had the accent I had till I left and tasted estrangement on my tongue. I felt, in talking to him, a sense of connection and loss. I wondered whether the ‘education’ I’d been sent away to get had been too dearly purchased even though in some respects I was grateful for it. This man described himself as ‘special needs’. I left him feeling that the term applied to everyone in some way or other. We all have special needs. So what the poem describes is not just the man, but how, in meeting him, I saw myself.

Instead of regarding my own concerns as a nuisance, I decided to be curious about them. And that led to the rest of the poems, some of which are about people I could claim to know well, but whose mysteries will speak only through the grace which all art hopes to be touched by.

REVIEWS

Compassionate, unflinching, and musically precise, Steve Logan's poems give voice to lives too often overlooked. He pays homage to the soul's endurance—and makes ordinary lives unforgettable. Inside Stories offers us a quiet blaze of compassion: poems that sing with truth.
Kate Rhodes, Novelist and Poet

Slipping between the observer and the observed, these poems are portraits where the painter seeks the subject's soul'. We view apparitions through a verbal mist, then, as if illumined by a shaft of sunlight, the subject comes alive with a vivid image or a striking turn of phrase. Steve Logan's concern is our relationship with our spiritual nature. But predominantly his thoughts stay nearer home: his South Wales upbringing, the people he knew then and now, and the twists and turns that made him the accomplished 'song-poet' he is today.

Philip Ward, Author and Critic

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Steve Logan is a poet and rock musician from South Wales. He has held appointments in English literature at the universities of Oxford, Cardiff and Cambridge, has written for many national newspapers and magazines and works also as a psychotherapist.

His previous poetry book is Heartlands (2024) a homage to the valleys culture he grew up in, financially poor but in other ways rich. Inside Stories explores how the values of that culture are active in Steve’s way of imagining his current world.

His seventh album is Wired (2026). Details of all Steve’s work in music and poetry, and of related gigs, can be found at www.stevelogan.co.uk where it’s possible to sign up for his regular newsletter.