Stephen Jackson was trained in Psychology, Logic & Metaphysics at St Andrews - only later as an artist. But from about the age of seven, writing seemed to come to him as naturally as breathing. It was also the refuge and enchantment for a child who, from the outset, perhaps perceived himself as one of life's outsiders.

Later, through hard slog and a very great deal of luck, he found himself in a media career that for him was a fantasy come true. A shattering fall through the cracks of a seemingly ordered existence caused him to lose it all. Secret writing again emerged as his salvation and his way of making sense of the murmurings to an inner darkness that all of us, at some time in our lives, must come to face. This book represents the trophy and perhaps the conquest of a lost decade.

Yet it was also in beating this bout of despair that he discovered the magical potential of digital imaging to transform our preconceptions of what we imagine the world to be like. The resulting juxtapositions of his art and poetry have been described as "fascinating and amazing" by a leading US novelist. Elsewhere these visuals found acclaim as "hauntingly beautiful": the words as "tight and life-enhancing", with a richness and texture comparable to John Donne's.

As he says: "A lot of what I explore now has to do with peeking up the wrong end of the telescope, to see in a clearer light all those walking wounded in the universal and (some might say) necessary battlefields that litter human aspirations and language. There are few outright winners here, except of the most ephemeral kind. The tiny obsessions of middle age: the games all of us sometimes have to play - these are my canvas - and my occasions for humour and optimism. The memories of my own dark period, the fresh revelations of a subsequent sort of rebirth, offer endless avenues of inquiry as well as new and welcome pleasures.

"Amongst the artists who intrigue me are Odilon Redon, Bill Brandt: Rousseau, Rothko, Blake, Chagall, Kandinsky, Edward Burra, Bonnard, Munch, Bacon, Frida Kahlo and Tamara de Lempicka; H R Giger, Ernst Haas, Georg Grosz, Francis Bowyer and Henri Cartier Bresson. Amongst poets? Sylvia Plath, perhaps almost above all: Larkin, Auden, Stephen Spender, Amy Lowell, Judith Wright, so many more...but above all, of course, The Boss (and there is only one)."