It is summer for months

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

Lifesaving Poems: Naomi Shihab Nye’s ‘The Art of Disappearing’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Father’s Day 1970 This is the day my father lets us sleep, then brings us tea in bed. The sun … More

I am in the pub with Rupert. We are talking about planning a thing. It’s definitely going to happen. A … More

I am at a thing. It is my thing, contributing to the thing of others, who I do not know. … More