GIVE Mike Edwards a subject and he'll sit down and write a poem about it. Even when challenged to write about a thong, the Asum Poet came up with the goods.

That verses, along with 99 others, are in his new book of poems called Was It Only Yesterday? with illustrations by another Vale of Evesham stalwart, Michael Barnard. The book was launched by a signing at Evesham Library on Saturday.

At the same time, Mike has put on cassette a selection of 20 poems from the book under the title Just a Score.

The poems were written by Mike for friends and acquaintances for his hospital radio show at Evesham Community Hospital, Mike's Miscellany, and for BBC Hereford and Worcester.

Was It Only Yesterday? follows his two previous volumes of poems The Lands of the Two Rivers, and The Road O'er the Hill.

He explained how he arrived at the title. "I toyed with that question one warm, June evening as I sat with a group of family and friends in the lounge of a restaurant in Mellieha in Malta, and pondered over the twists and turns of fate which had brought me once again to the islands I had come to love so far from those Lands of the Two Rivers and the quiet country Road O'er the Hill which wended its way past the home that had once been my paternal grandparents'.

"I looked at my two grandsons, older now than I was when, a youth of 17, I had asked my wife Marjorie to marry me. I looked at my younger son and his beautiful Maltese wife who had become our daughter from the moment she entered our lives. I smiled at Marjorie: we had been married 51 years, a time in which so much had happened since we stood together at the altar of Pebworth church, and yet it seemed like, it seemed like...Was it only yesterday? Thus a title was born."

Just as Mike Edwards can sit down and write about any subject, so Michael Barnard can reproduce a sketch of any topic. So for the front cover of the book

he has assembled a montage of Mike and Marjorie's wedding day at the end of March 1952, taking in the church, the windy day, the reception, the train journey from Evesham station and the honeymoon hotel.

The book costs £8.50, the cassette £5.25, and there will be a special offer of one copy of the book and the tape for £12.50, available from the Almonry Heritage Centre, Evesham Book Centre, Bookworms, Bengeworth, and The Mews Coffee Pot, Vine Mews. The Almonry will accept mail orders which cost an extra £2.

The publications are being underwritten by the Vale of Evesham Historical Society and all profits will be donated to Evesham Community Hospital.