Lifesaving Lines: The Trees, by Philip Larkin

Early May. Sitting in the bay window upstairs at Cricklewood revising for finals. My pink vest and purple jeans phase.…

More places of hope

I said here a couple of years ago that Natalie Jabbar’s blog of curated poems each April is like a…

But first came Plath. After Ursuala Le Guin, the only female author we studied (OK – Jane Austen). Her name…

Our tiny minds blown by ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, ‘Spelt From Sibyl’s Leaves’ and ‘As Kingfisher’s Catch Fire’, we…

John Foggin has been kind enough to review The Afterlife on his blog. You can read the full review here.…

On a spring day as far from ‘late in dour October’ it would be harder to imagine, James Schuyler’s The…

I am delighted to announce that Blue Diode have accepted my new poetry manuscript and will publish my sixth collection,…

So this is a bit spooky. All week I had in mind these marvellous final words from Lucille Clifton’s poem…

For several weeks before Christmas I had these words from Ian McMillan’s peerless ‘Stone, I Presume’ rattling around my head.…

Happy new year, everyone. I am interrupting my current series of Lifesaving Lines post to encourage you to watch a…

Just a few hours left of 2021. Time to reflect on what this year has been. Until a week or…

Call the Midwife What I like in a man: not showing desperate – though that’s what he was. Old enough…

During December 2019 I blogged a series of poems to celebrate the season of Advent. Some of these were about…

Two great lines for the price of one (it is Christmas, after all) this week, from Marie Howe’s extraordinary poem…

I have been thinking a lot about the poetry of Julia Darling this week. Her work became essential to me…

Thank you to everyone who has commented to me either publicly or in private about my new series of blog…

We have a lot of windows. I sit next to them at this time of the year thinking, Just five…

I have been thinking a lot this week about a line from Tomas Tranströmer’s masterpiece, ‘Alone’. (I have also blogged…