Lifesaving Poems: Sean O’Brien’s ‘Before’

To safe and almost universal silence I published How Far From Here is Home? (Stride) a few days before Christmas in … More

Falling in love with Holub’s ‘Love’

I was lucky. I was taught English in one of those classrooms with complete sets of A Taste of Honey, … More

It was summer. I found myself on the top floor of the library, on the recommendation of a friend: … More

One year I decided that I would decorate one of my teaching rooms with my collection of Poems on the … More

I came across Hubert Moore’s fantastic book of poems The Hearing Room (Shoetstring, 2006) via my friend and neighbour Lawrence Sail. In … More

Readers who have followed my Lifesaving Poems series will know by now that there isn’t and wasn’t a plan about … More

For the last nine years at the end of the first week in July I have been saying goodbye to … More

I wrote here recently about losing my ambition as a writer. In case readers are in any doubt, the stuff … More

The Bath Festivals‘ Write Team was a creative writing project designed to develop pupil confidence and engagement in their learning. The … More

In 2007 Sue Dymoke, Andrew Lambirth and I got together and decided we were going to apply to the ESRC … More

I want to live – Sharon Olds The most intense reading group I ever belonged to wasn’t really a reading … More

Sometimes you do not get a poem, or what a poet is up to, straight away. In the case of … More

Apart from e e cummings and the genius Anon, one of my chief discoveries in the Voices and Junior Voices series that I … More

I I first came across e e cummings’s ‘in Just’ in an anthology, Wordscapes, edited by Barry Maybury (OUP, 1971). … More

I first encountered Siân Hughes‘s poems sitting around a table with some talented teenage poets at the Arvon Foundation‘s writing … More

As I say in my previous blog post, I owe my knowledge of ‘8.06 p.m. June 10th 1970’ to the … More

I first came across ‘Birth of the Foal’ at the recommendation of the great Cliff Yates. He told me he’d been … More

The funniest thing you will ever read about Elizabeth Bishop (or teaching, or anything else) is Mark Halliday‘s essay Moose … More