Lifesaving Lines: History, by Tomaž Šalamun

The other day I bumped into Tomaž Šalamun. I was enjoying the last few hours of walking around Ljubljana, took…

A new review of Riddance… from 2013

A huge thank you to Ken Head and Helen Ivory at Ink Sweat & Tears for this review of Riddance…

A huge shout out and massive thank you to Maria Taylor and her wonderful Commonplace blog, where yesterday I discovered…

It was the dying of the light of my time on Twitter. Days when I miss it, I think of…

I walked into the middle of a Ted Hughes poem the other week. An early morning dog walk, like any…

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

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…