I like to think of myself as a pretty consistent person. I look askance with a certain smugness at the…
Archive
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…
Lifesaving Lines: “Still Do I Keep My Look, My Identity…”, by Gwendolyn Brooks
It was the dying of the light of my time on Twitter. Days when I miss it, I think of…
Lifesaving Lines: An October Salmon, by Ted Hughes
I walked into the middle of a Ted Hughes poem the other week. An early morning dog walk, like any…
Lifesaving Lines: The Trees, by Philip Larkin
Early May. Sitting in the bay window upstairs at Cricklewood revising for finals. My pink vest and purple jeans phase.…
More places of hope
I said here a couple of years ago that Natalie Jabbar’s blog of curated poems each April is like a…
Lifesaving Lines: Edge, by Sylvia Plath
But first came Plath. After Ursuala Le Guin, the only female author we studied (OK – Jane Austen). Her name…
Lifesaving Lines: Spring, by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Our tiny minds blown by ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, ‘Spelt From Sibyl’s Leaves’ and ‘As Kingfisher’s Catch Fire’, we…
John Foggin’s review of The Afterlife
John Foggin has been kind enough to review The Afterlife on his blog. You can read the full review here.…
Lifesaving Poems 