Love....And Other Poems

From island to island ... Born in England and brought up on the south coast. Hilary Seymour-Cole King has never forgotten her English roots. She was educated there and in London, where she worked in advertising. She decided to emigrate to the United States in 1957 in order to study American advertising methods, and this led to her marriage to an American who had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford. Hilary had her fi rst poem Spitfi res in the Sun published at the age of 16 when at boarding school, and she continued to write poetry and short stories. She became an advertising copywriter, an editor of several womens magazines in New York, and then founded and ran her own Public Relations and Marketing agency in Manhattan for over 40 years. Hilary has continued to write throughout the years - whether living in New York or on Shelter Island, where she acquired a summer house for her children, Alexandra, Edward and Vanessa in the late 70s. Then, in the 80s, she returned to her fi rst love, Italy, and acquired a 200 year old ruin in Umbria, in a hamlet called Morra, on the Tuscany border. Originally a tobacco drying tower, this took nearly four years of money, Italian permits, Italian workmen, and so on to restore the building and create a casa di campagna, a little country house. This house was the joy of her life for many years and she visited it whenever possible. Now, at 82, Hilary has retired to Shelter Island where she lives permanently. She has completed her fi rst book of poems and is working on her memoirs of a childhood in England during World War II. Her greatest joy today is when her grandchildren, Duncan, Fiona and Liam, visit her. As she says, Shelter Island is so like England, where you are surrounded by the beauty, peace and quiet of the countryside and the sea.