Next month I will publish my sixth collection of poems, The Wind and the Rain, with Blue Diode Publishing. I…
Archive
Launching The Wind and the Rain
I am delighted to announce that I will be launching my new collection, The Wind and the Rain, published by…
The poetry of Gianluca Vialli
The great Sampdoria, Juventus and Chelsea striker Gianluca Vialli has died, and I am sad. He was 58 and had…
James Schuyler: Centenary year celebrations
Open call for guest blog posts celebrating the life and work of James Schuyler This November, we celebrate the centenary…
On having allies
I once heard a senior British poet warming to a riff during a reading on the topic of the acknowledgements…
What you read in 2022
Here are the blog posts from 2022 that you read most often Lifesaving Lines: The Death of Fred Clifton, by…
Advent meditation 3
This time last year, I had begun a third period waiting for a response to a new manuscript of poems.…
Advent meditation 2
One of the things I have learned about myself in the last year or so is that I can sometimes…
Advent meditation
I like to think of myself as a pretty consistent person. I look askance with a certain smugness at the…
The Wind and the Rain – due in June 2023
I’m delighted to announce that The Wind and the Rain, my sixth collection of poems, will be published with Blue…
UCU Strike: reflections and resources
Thank you to everyone who stopped by and liked or commented on yesterday’s blog post about the UCU strike action…
UCU Strike: a list of poems about work
Today was not a normal day of work for me. Instead of teaching my amazing students, I chose to participate…
The Kevin Jackson Award
I was privileged to meet and work with the late writer and critic Kevin Jackson in 2011. We tutored a…
Not much
What’s been happening? Well, not much. Which is another, deflecting, way of saying quite a lot, actually. So much that…
Lifesaving Lines: Pobble, by Heather Trickey
Heather Trickey was a social research scientist, charity worker, Quaker and poet. In 2020, during the first Covid lockdown, she…
Lifesaving Lines: The Job of Paradise, by Roger Robinson
My personal poetry highlight of the summer was listening to Roger Robinson read and be in conversation with Pádraig Ó…
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 new review of Lifesaving Poems… from 2015
A huge shout out and massive thank you to Maria Taylor and her wonderful Commonplace blog, where yesterday I discovered…