David Chaloner remembered

This is David Chaloner ...

 

 1944 – 2010

Today is a very sad day. I will be saying goodbye to my very dear friend David Chaloner whose funeral service it is at 1p.m. He came into my life less than three years ago, but made an enormous impact on me. We were born in the same year. Both from working class backgrounds and with no formal design education. We shared an enthusiasm for life and very much believed in ‘living in the moment’. We spent many a long and happy evening at the Groucho Club dissecting life, people and experiences. There was never enough time. And now time has run out and he has gone.

But David was also a wonderful poet. He loved words – something we also shared. He brought warmth and happiness into many peoples lives. And even through the difficult struggle with the illness he had to endure over the past two years, he still maintained his sense of humour and optimism. David was a beautiful man who will be bitterly missed by all who knew him. But he leaves behind his work on the printed page, which will keep his sprit alive. Here is one of his evocative poems, set in a typeface that we both shared a great love for, Baskerville…

 

Comments

[Daniel Chaloner]

David was my uncle and the man responsible for me pursuing a career in visual arts. He always encouraged me, always had an interesting (sometimes contentious) counterpoint to our discussions and was a mine of information. I’m not a poet and so must admit to not understanding all his works, but his enthusiasm for creative process has always inspired me. And will continue to do so.
Sleep well my friend.

[Andrew Graham-Yooll, OBE]

David Chaloner, poet, inspired my efforts to translate poets from Argentina into English. We had a late night discussion on the subject during supper at the British Embassy in Buenos Aires in 2000. David grumbled that there was no edition in English of local poets. Both of us well into the red wine, I said I would provide him with a sampling. The result was the bilingual anthology, Twenty Poets from Argentina, published by David Tipton, of Redbeck Press. David Chaloner was at the launch at the Poetry Society in London in 2004. I went on to produce an anthology of forty poets for the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2010. The final version, published in November 2011 in Buenos Aires, is the bilingual, Argentine Poetry for the XXIst Century (about 70 poets born between 1874 and 1974). So, belatedly, thank you, David Chaloner.

[mike dempsey]

Hello Andrew - I'm sure that David is looking down on this event whith great satisfaction. A lovely man and a terrible lost to us all.
Regards Mike