The response to Nicholas' writing in The Silence at the Song's End  has been extraordinary; we have sold some 4000 copies, but better than that,  there is a feeling that the strength of his thought and lyricism is enduring . These events have all happened without any prompting or suggestion from us.  We pass them on not in a vaunting spirit but because they have surprised and moved us, and show how in any art,  the echoes of an individual mind can touch others:

The STONECARVER John das Gupta,(below, right) who did the garden stone for Nicholas, asked if he could use some of his other words for an exhibition piece for the Memorials by Artists permanent exhibition of memorial art.   The words he chose are "Remember how the streets ring out for every soul that thought and felt and walked through them in weakness and in strength".

Two COMPOSERS have asked to set the poems to music:  notably the distinguished composer Joseph Phibbs (who has been commissioned for the Proms, for Aldeburgh and the BBC).  He was commissioned to write a song cycle for a premiere in September 2008 which was performed in Nelson's church at Burnham Thorpe, in Norfolk, and came upon the book. The theme of the concert was youth and the sea.    He saw straight away that he wanted to use Nicholas'  poems as his lyric.

Many, many letters have reached us.  The youngest writer was seventeen;  the oldest over ninety.

 One of the most notable letters is from Professor John Carey (left) of Merton College Oxford, one of the greatest of modern critics:  He writes:

  "I have read and re-read Nicholas' book.  What impresses me again and again is the adventurousness - I don't mean in the boat-sailing sense though that is truly splendid, but in the thought. He had an original mind - an original personality - and there are, in my experience, very few young people of student age that one can say that of.  It makes me think of the Ben Jonson poem which has the lines about "It is not growing like a tree, In bulk, doth make man better be: and goes on with "A lily of a day Was fairer far in May, Although it fade and die that night, It was the child & flower of light". Reading Nicholas' book makes me think he was like that"

 Another reader linked him to the coast where we live:

      "There is an extraordinary and mystical beauty about [the writings] ...I can only think they will be of greatest interest and impact upon people in Aldeburgh and the Suffolk coastlands, where light and beauty and a strange melancholy so often make company for its poets and musicians and artists".

ALSO read ‘Precious Words from Deep Inside’ by Kate Kellaway from The Observer Dec 2007