Bermuda’s complex history, as well as its immense beauty, has inspired a writer to produce her first book of poetry.

Wendy Fulton Steginsky, who grew up on the Island and regularly returns here to visit family, will launch The Tide of Bermuda’s Light this evening at 6pm at the National Library.

“It’s about the natural world. It’s also about loss, about the war — the Second World War. It touches on slavery. It has those kinds of themes running through it. It’s not just pretty poems about a pretty place,” she told The Royal Gazette yesterday.

The 61-year-old author, who lives in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, says the “sea’s rhythms seeped into her bones” while growing up in Bermuda and never went away.

She gave up her job as a managing editor for the online literary magazine Wild River Review to write full-time and hasn’t looked back.

“I’ve been writing full-time for about seven years,” she said.

“This is my first book and it’s all about Bermuda. It’s my view of Bermuda growing up and also living abroad. Bermuda has quite an allure.

“It’s just one of those things; it has this pull. The book was really inspired by my love of Bermuda but I take a workshop every year in Bucks County and it really came out of those workshops.”

Ms Steginsky attended grammar school in St George’s and Bermuda High School for Girls before going to boarding school in England, aged 16, followed by Oxford University for a year and Ohio State University in the US.

She worked as a special-education teacher before becoming an editor.

Her book, published by Aldrich Press, contains 25 poems and she will read some of them at this evening’s event, which is sponsored by the Department of Community and Cultural Affairs. Ms Steginsky sent off her manuscript to a small, niche publishing house in the US, which accepted The Tide of Bermuda’s Light, and she encouraged local writers to pursue their ambitions to be published.

“It’s an intimidating process at best,” she said. “Here in Bermuda, writers feel a little isolated but once you break through that and are able to find a publisher, it’s exhilarating.”

The book is available to buy at the Bermuda Bookstore, the Book Cellar in St George’s and on www.amazon.com.