Herod With Wikileaks in the headlines you could say the timing was perfect. Three Iraqi profs…
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Poetry highlights of 2013
Two readings stood out for me in 2013. The first was at an arts centre in the middle of nowhere…
Teachers’ views of creativity
Teachers’ views of creativity is my new research article exploring poetry writing pedagogy. Here is the Abstract: Discourses of creativity in…
Advent poem 3: Mary
Mary At first a fluttering then a kick, his fist pummelling my ribcage when I knelt to pray. They…
Advent poem 2: The Holiday Inn
The Holiday Inn Northerners. But honest. Him, hands like shovels, his eyes brimming and fish-flick. And her,…
Advent poem 1: Joseph
Joseph They say there are signs. Not with her. I’m no professor but neither am I stupid. …
Life Begins With Cancer
This is the recording of my reading ‘Life Begins With Cancer’, recorded at the Greenbelt Festival on Sunday 25th August,…
Waiting to be picked
If you’re not enough without the gold medal, you’ll never be enough with it. – John Candy, Cool Runnings I did not…
Gratitude
I’m grateful to you, you see. I wanted to tell you. –Raymond Carver (‘For Tess’) A kind, wise man once…
Lifesaving Poems: Piotr Sommer’s ‘Morning on Earth’
Morning on Earth Morning on earth, light snow, and just when it was so warm, practically spring. But the thermometer…
Lifesaving Poems: Kate Bingham’s ‘Things I Learned at University’
Things I Learned at University How to bike on cobblestones and where to signal right.How to walk through doors held…
Lifesaving Poems: T.S. Eliot’s ‘Hysteria’
Hysteria As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her…
Lifesaving Poems: ‘Underneath the mathematics of time’
Phil Bowen gave me this poem, written by a ten-year-old girl, in 1998 to illustrate a writing game he submitted…
Riddance one year on
A year ago I published Riddance, a book of poems, with Worple Press. It concerns my diagnosis and experience of cancer…
Remission anniversary seven
Today is the seventh anniversary of the day I was told I was officially in remission from cancer. The popular…
An interview: Putting Words to Cancer
Thank you to Julia McGuinness for posting this interview with me on her Creative Connections blog. In it I discuss…
‘I am fragments’: a note from Seamus Heaney
In the spring of 1998 I wrote to Seamus Heaney. I asked him to consider writing a Foreword to the…
Heaney’s Pedagogy
A comment Mark Robinson made in the days following Seamus Heaney’s death in August resonated with me. He said he…
Lifesaving Poems 