Lifesaving Lines: You are not alone, by Thomas A. Clark

Dear Thomas A. Clark I won’t lie, until recently I hadn’t heard of you. (We could talk for a long … More

On not keeping up

Like the man Hemingway describes going bankrupt gradually and then suddenly, I realised the other day that I can no … More

I pinched myself to be there. God knows how I got invited. I can’t remember. Perhaps I invited myself. Poets … More

It felt like a good idea at the time. A way to pass lockdown, of trying to ignore the grief … More

Here are the blog posts from 2022 that you read most often Lifesaving Lines: The Death of Fred Clifton, by … More

What’s been happening? Well, not much. Which is another, deflecting, way of saying quite a lot, actually. So much that … More

My personal poetry highlight of the summer was listening to Roger Robinson read and be in conversation with Pádraig Ó … More

The other day I bumped into Tomaž Šalamun. I was enjoying the last few hours of walking around Ljubljana, took … More

It was the dying of the light of my time on Twitter. Days when I miss it, I think of … More

Our tiny minds blown by ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, ‘Spelt From Sibyl’s Leaves’ and ‘As Kingfisher’s Catch Fire’, we … More

We have a lot of windows. I sit next to them at this time of the year thinking, Just five … More

I have been thinking a lot this week about a line from Tomas Tranströmer’s masterpiece, ‘Alone’. (I have also blogged … More

The line that’s been buzzing round my head this week is the final phrase from Michael Laskey’s miracle poem of … More

Recently, my relationship with Wednesdays has changed. It’s quite a long story, and one I don’t want to trouble you … More

The line that’s been buzzing round my head the last couple of weeks is from Robert Lowell’s heartbreaking poem ‘For … More

I was very saddened to hear of the death of Brendan Kennelly this week. He had been a long-standing presence … More

‘Awful but cheerful’ is the final phrase and line of ‘The Bight‘, by Elizabeth Bishop. I’ve always felt that the … More

I was at a thing. Very rarely for me, it was my own thing, only my second in front of … More