Not exactly fearless

Someone who knows me very well knocked me sideways with a comment the other day. Remarking on this blog,…

It is summer for months

It Is Summer for Months Clothes are skimpy and tans are got without flight bags. We saunter beside a…

The Art of Disappearing When they say Don’t I know you?say no. When they invite you to the partyremember what…

I am driving to a thing. Not a famous thing, an out of the way thing. A classroom, perhaps.…

I am not at a thing. The things have dried up (or I have stopped going). I am thingless. I…

Thanks to the vision and generosity of Jean Sprackland, between 1999-2001 I had the privilege of working with the great…

Sometime in the early Nineties I did a very brave thing. I took myself to a poetry reading. I went…

The review isn’t exactly vicious as such, merely purely personal and savage. It stops short of questioning your parentage, but…

The Class to the Class of 2014 after Raymond Carver The class with beautiful scarves The class who learned…

I began writing the Lifesaving Poems posts in May, 2011. Below is a list of the twenty most popular poems…

You think it will be about your childhood. It turns out to be about an onion. Or a night in…

For now, at least, it has gone. The notebooks with promising phrases, the backs of envelopes with doodles: they are…

I have finished the thing. People come up to me to say things. It seems to have gone well. While…

Seven years ago I published The Year of Drinking Water, a pamphlet of poems, about my experience of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (Exeter…

Here are the text and ppt presentations of my NATE Conference 2014 keynote speech on The Power of Poetry. PDF…

Now that we have finally had one in the UK, I found myself wondering recently how many of my Lifesaving Poems choices…

A scan, with different initials. The train journey to it, biting nails; the one back pretending not to be radioactive.…

Groundsmen The pile of cuttings puts on dreadful weight, swelters in the season, and leaks treacle. Beside it, the…