The fourth and final poem in our Gaza Advent series is by Samar Al Guhssain. Mihrab, by Samar Al Guhssain,…
Archive
Gaza Advent 3: This is how I cook my grief by Batool Abu Akleen
The third poem in our Gaza Advent series is by Batool Abu Akleen. This is how I cook my grief,…
Gaza Advent 2: Palestine Still Lives, by Sarah al Bohassi
The second poem in our Gaza Advent series is by Sarah al Bohassi. Palestine Still Lives, by Sarah al Bohassi…
Gaza Advent 1: Detaining a poem, by Dareen Tatour
Welcome to this series of Gaza Advent blog posts. Every Sunday during Advent I will post a link to a…
Gaza Advent – a new series of blog posts starting tomorrow
Starting tomorrow, to mark the season of Advent, a new blog series celebrating the work of poets from Gaza and…
This was Canada
I was listening to Radio 4 the other day. (You might think this unremarkable, but it was. I still have…
Lifesaving Lines: You are not alone, by Thomas A. Clark
Dear Thomas A. Clark I won’t lie, until recently I hadn’t heard of you. (We could talk for a long…
The jump
But at some point you have to make the jump. How does this work in practice? First I am struck…
This is writing!
The occupational hazard of going to things where other writers are also present is that they will always at some…
I blame the dead
We have been to a thing. Breaking with this blog’s tradition of oblique references to low-level gossip and self-recrimination at…
There was a door
I do not have brilliant form with Louise Glück. I seem to remember the Poetry Book Society choosing or recommending…
A step from me
In August last year I wrote about Tom Paulin’s poem of hurt and slow healing ‘A Lyric Afterwards’. It wasn’t…
On being useless at social media
A colleague of mine said to me at the end of a lecture the other day that she wished I…
On not being on the radio
A lovely radio producer, whom I shall call Julian, emailed me to ask if I would like to talk on…
Birdsong
This morning, as on every morning for the last two weeks, the wood was loud with birdsong. I heard robin,…
Ourselves again (again?)
After Joe Biden won the 2020 US presidential election, I posted one of the very few poems to this blog…
When you can’t, it’s impossible
I can’t write poems in recent weeks either. It’s not the first time it’s happened. And it’s not worth going…
New year blog maintenance
Happy new year, everyone. I’ve been doing a bit of tidying up on some of the pages of this blog.…
Lifesaving Poems 