It was the beauty of Bermuda that first inspired Grace Welch to start writing poetry five years ago.

Mrs. Welch is originally from Waterloo, Ontario (home of the Blackberry computer) and works in the global training programme at ACE.

?I write mainly nature poems,? said Mrs. Welch. ?Seeing the natural beauty of Bermuda is what spurned me on to write. I am from Canada originally. I came here several years ago.?

Although her poems are nature based, she confessed she is not normally an ?en plein air? poet. Most her poems are written indoors on a computer.

?I am very much a computer-oriented person,? she said. ?I only go outside to write poetry if I can see the screen on my laptop. Two of my poems were written outside. The poem ?Robert?s Place?, I wrote for my husband. It is about life from his perspective. The other is about the ship going off into the distance.?

She holds a degree in rhetoric and professional writing from the University of Waterloo. She said a strong classical education has helped to make her a confident writer.

?My college courses covered things like English literature and the professional art of persuasion, Plato and Aristotle, and more practical things,? she said. ?I ended up with a good background in English and the written word.?

She said she has been strongly inspired by several Canadian poets including Earle Birney, Raymond Souster and E.J. Pratt among others. She also likes American poet Mary Oliver who is famous for poems like ?At Great Pond? and ?Wild Geese?.

Mrs. Welch said she is not the type of poet who can go to a mike and start reciting poetry ?on the fly?.

?It is interesting that some poets are performance poets,? she said. ?They can go up to the microphone and just recite their poetry, or they can just make it up on the fly. I can?t do that. It is a written exercise for me. I have a bad memory and I would have to be reading my poem.?

She writes at least two poems a month, and uses her family as critics. ?A few of us have now formed a poetry circle of about three,? she said. ?We meet once a month. These are people I didn?t know were interested in poetry, before this book came out.?

She first heard of poetry anthology through an advertisement The Department of Community and Cultural Affairs ran in . The Department of Community and Cultural Affairs also offered a poetry workshop for those with their poems in the book. The workshop was run by local poet and writer Ron Lightbourne.

?The workshop did help me, though more with poems I wrote later,? she said. ?It has helped me with some new direction in writing.?

She has one son, William, age four, and likes drawing and running.

The Bermuda Poetry Anthology was launched recently at The Berkeley Institute with a special ceremony and reading by several poets including Wendy Fulton Steginsky, Toni Robinson, Krystal McKenzie, Shirley Oro Almagro, Ron Lightbourne reading for Dr. Michael Gilkes, Elizabeth (Levetzau) Gray, Alan C. Smith and Arthur DeSilva.

It is now available in bookstores all over Bermuda.