This was just a crow

My Crow A crow flew into the tree outside my window. It was not Ted Hughes’s crow, or Galway’s crow.…

Cancer patients’ reviews of Riddance

Riddance has been reviewed by cancer patients, and former patients, under the aegis of Macmillan Cancer Support. You can find out…

One year go I celebrated with friends the publication of Love for Now, my journal-memoir of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of…

Dear Anthony I’m writing to let you know what you already know in your bones, as you put it much…

Once upon a time I broke the rules and spoke with another poet (it doesn’t matter who) about a…

I Am Not I I am not I. I am this one walking beside me whom I do not…

My memoir of cancer, Love for Now, has been reviewed by cancer patients, and former patients, under the aegis of Macmillan…

I get to the reading on time. I find a place near the front, so I can get to the…

Sometimes I think it’s gone forever -Ken Smith I want to write a poem, Seamus Heaney says, but I have…

Seth Godin says in The Icarus Deception that however many good reviews you are lucky to get for your work, it…

I have been thinking a lot recently about the gap between what is expected of us and what we think…

Just as I do not go around thinking about my cancer all the time, there are times when I feel…

I have been thinking a lot recently about Tomas Tranströmer’s poem ‘Alone’. When I first read it I was taken…

When I visit schools to read and talk about poetry there is often some sort of Q and A following…

Dear Anthony (I will never get used to calling you Tony) Here are some words of advice from your nearing-fifty-year-old…

I began the year with two books which helped me slow down and breathe: Christian McEwen’s World Enough and Time and…

These are the most read Lifesaving Poems posts of 2013. Mary Oliver, ‘The Journey’ I first read this on…

An old friend of mine wrote to me the other day, out of the blue, to tell me about…