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Sometime during his thirteenth year, he was bed-ridden for three months, with pleurisy. During that time he read the complete Shakespeare, filling up several notebooks with quotations that appealed to him and with comments about the characters, stunned by the language.

He then read the Bible, the complete John Keats and Wilfred Owen. His mother loved classical music, and so the days of those months and the hours of reading were also filled with Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, and Brahms to name a few, on what was then the BBC Third programme.

Something happened during those months and Marcus knew then that he would spend much if not all of his life writing.  He has.

Starting with High School and University magazines, and an honours degree in English Literature, and writing poems to be read accompanied by jazz, Marcus moved through two years in USA on a Writing Scholarship, and followed that with two years on a private grant, completing translations of Baudelaire and two original plays (all of which has since been lost).

That was followed by sixteen years of waiting, for the time when Marcus could do justice to what life had shown to him and the talents he happened to have.

In the mid-1980s, the energy to write, the sureness of what to write about and where in himself to write from finally fell in place and he has been writing and teaching ever since.  Marcus' first novel Out of Nowhere was finished in 1991 (available from i-Universe), and was followed by a five part work of prose-poetry called Note for Note - Another Pentateuch, started in 1995 and completed in 2008 and two books of which have already been published by i-Universe.

For several years Marcus has been collecting material for songs and actually began writing them down in 2006, since when he has already completed seven Volumes with one hundred songs in each and is working on an eigth volume.  The third volume was published by i-Universe in January 2011.

Some of them are songs, some are poems, some are lyrics waiting for melodies, but all of them are written to be at least accompanied by music and dance, and this is why he has called them Sopolyrimu.  Marcus is constantly amazed by the steadiness of the flow.

Sopolyrimu
(Songs, Poems & Lyrics for Music)
Volume 1, Songs from the Villa
Soft cover. ISBN 9781440122798

"The first volume is called Songs from the Villa simply because while I was writing the sopolyrimu contained in that volume I was living in a small house like an Italian villa, with its red roof and white swirling stucco walls."

"My favourite place to write was sitting on a simple bench (log on bricks) leaning against the north-facing back wall and enjoying the sun through the seasons."

Of course there are other interpretations of the concept of ‘villa’ but that is the actual source of the title. The sopolyrimu are presently in chronological order and there is no other significance in the sequence.

"Exquisitely beautiful, beyond superb" (MJ Australia)

"Hearing this sopolyrimu, my whole body got goosebumps...like being touched by the divine"  (EM Spain)

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Sopolyrimu
(Songs, Poems & Lyrics for Music)
Volume 2, Songs from down the Lane
Soft cover. ISBN 9781440167928

"The sopolyrimu in this second volume could be called songs from the spirit, to awaken the spirit of compassion in the listener, and, from what has been said in response to them, this seems indeed to be true. 

They are also songs of gratitude for the miracle of life, and laments for the way I and some others all too often trash this miracle by quite reckless and cruel behaviour and temporary or prolonged bouts of simply forgetting what on earth we are doing here, and the consequences of what we do and the consequences of forgetting how serious those consequences are."

"Imbued with a tranquil certainty and power" (TH, USA)

"Utterly overwhelmed by the depth of feeling expressed....these will last 500 years or more"  (EC, UK)

Sopolyrimu
(Songs, Poems & Lyrics for Music)
Volume 3, Songs like fallen Apples
Soft cover. ISBN 9781450265997

 The third Volume of Sopolyrimu was written between October 2007 and March 2008, and mainly in a small house not far from Occidental and Sebastopol, Northern California.  The lane on which the house is to be found is called Fallen Apple Lane, from which the title of this volume is derived.

“If these works had been released over the author’s lifetime he would have become a national treasure by now.  The work is distinguished not only by its fine feeling but also by its high level of craftsmanship.  In many ways, the work has a serene devotional quality reminiscent of T. S. Eliot.”

(Harris Smart, author of "The Yellow House", a multi-media exploration of the friendship between Paul Gauguin and Vincent van Gogh)