Once There Was Time

Once There Was Time is a meditation on memory, loss, and the irreducible strangeness of ordinary moments. Freeman writes with the quiet authority of a man who gave up the comfortable certainties of insurance work to follow an uncompromising artistic vision. His verse belongs to the Georgian tradition: accessible in syntax but profound in feeling, grounded in English landscape and the textures of daily life yet reaching toward something transcendent. These are poems that understand how childhood haunts adulthood, how light falling on a familiar room can suddenly make the present feel like a visitation from the past. Freeman's voice is distinctive: solemn without pomposity, precise without coldness. He writes about time not as an abstraction but as something felt in the body, in the way a room remembers those who have left it. This is poetry for readers who want language to slow them down and pay attention. It is quiet, but it is not minor.