Valentin Per Lind was born in 1959 and studied History and English Literature at Leicester University, though, if he had his life again, he might well have chosen theology also, since this has been a topic of endless fascination throughout his life. He is passionately interested in the Greek Mystery Cults, Jewish Qabalah, Christian mysticism and the European Witch-Cult of the Middle Ages, entailing some lengthy discussions in many of the poems’ notes. From his earliest days, he thrilled to Beowulf, and its abiding image of the Norse hero battling monsters, and the Homeric epics fired his imagination. At university, he was heavily influenced by the Romantic poets of the early nineteenth century as well as the later Victorian poets such as Tennyson, in particular Tennyson’s Idylls of the King with its re-imagining of the Arthurian cycle. Combined, these influences engendered a love of poetry that endures to this day. Major influences on his imagination are the ghost stories of M.R. James, the Cthulhu mythos of H.P. Lovecraft, and the supernatural poems of Edgar Allan Poe, with their inspired cinematic adaptations by Roger Corman. Following university, Valentin rejected his parents’ attempts to force him into a professional career, and instead left home to join a Rajneesh meditation commune, but the pagan element in his blood won out and after a meeting with Maxine Sanders, he was initiated into the Temple of the Mother, an Alexandrian coven under the Eldership of Maxine. This, and subsequent journeyings into the occult, has inflected his poetry with a strong sense of the macabre. Valentin Per Lind has been writing poetry for thirty-five years, although the last ten years have seen his greatest output. His first book was Corvix, was widely acclaimed, and September 2022 will see the publication of Corvix Expanded Edition which has been extensively revised and reformatted with twenty-six new poems.Read more about this authorRead less about this author