How I put The Art of Falling together In May 2012 my first pamphlet If We Could Speak Like Wolves…
Archive
Lifesaving Poems: Michel Quoist’s ‘Thank you Lord, thank you’
Thank you Lord, thank you. Thank you for all the gifts that you have given me today, Thank you for…
Guest Blog Post: Don’t Think About A White Horse, by Kate Bowles
Don’t Think About A White Horse Coming closer, he turns out to be you – or nearly. Once you…
The missing poet
I have been at a thing. Poets I love and trust were there. We laughed. We invented scurrilous Twitter-profiles. It…
Poetry society
I am minding my own business, putting out some rubbish, when it happens. An elderly man I know, a neighbour,…
Except the Americans
As I said recently, I have been moving. Not away, not abroad. But here, within the space that already exists,…
Guest Blog Post: On Literary Envy, by Robin Houghton
On Literary Envy “Comparison is the thief of joy” –Teddy Roosevelt You wake up one morning. You check in…
Guest Blog Post: Dear Diary, by Josephine Corcoran
This is the second in a series of Guest Blog Posts that I am hosting this year. More are…
The missing blog post
after and with apologies to Mark Halliday The missing blog post has gone AWOL. Never sure of its place in…
A review of Lifesaving Poems
My deep thanks to Maria Taylor, who has written the most lovely appreciation of Lifesaving Poems. Thank you Maria for capturing its…
Homesick
“A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love sickness. It is a reaching-out toward…
Inside Lifesaving Poems 5
An artist needs not so much an audience, as to feel a need to answer, a promise to respond. Robert…
Inside Lifesaving Poems 4
I have been moving. Not moving house, moving within it. Stuff has come with me, some of it has vanished…
Open letter to Peter Sansom on reading Careful What You Wish For
Dear Peter Cover-to-cover and back-to-back twice, as I do, once before sleeping, then between zeds on a train woken to Tickets,…
Inside Lifesaving Poems 3
As I have said before, there wasn’t a plan. Which does not mean I don’t feel the luckiest man alive…
Lifesaving Poems interview podcast
This is the link to the podcast of the interview I gave yesterday on the Arena programme, RTE, about…
Lifesaving Poems: Rosemary Tonks’s ‘The Sofas, Fogs, and Cinemas’
The Sofas, Fogs, and Cinemas I have lived it, and lived it, My nervous, luxury civilisation, My sugar-loving nerves have…
Lifesaving Poems: Denise Riley’s ‘A Misremembered Lyric’
A Misremembered Lyric, by Denise Riley I heard this poem for the first time a week ago, at the Bodmin…
