Timetable We all remember school, of course: the lino warming, shoe bag smell, expanse of polished floor. It’s where we…
Lifesaving Poems: Evangeline Paterson’s ‘Literary Portrait’
I met Evangeline Paterson once, in the early Nineties, at a workshop in London. Rupert Loydell suggested I went as…
Lifesaving Poems: Laura Apol’s ‘The Switch’
Laura Apol’s ‘The Switch’ is a witty poem which explores the tension between primal, and sometimes unforeseen, forces and the…
Lifesaving Poems: Emily Riall’s ‘Duty Psychiatrist’
Emily Riall will be a new name to many readers of this blog. She was a fine young poet…
Lifesaving Poems: Alison Mosquera’s ‘Tamoxifen’
Earlier this year I ran a Poetry School course about poetry and health called Written on the Body. It was…
Lifesaving Poems: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin’s ‘Swineherd’
Swineherd When all this is over, said the swineherd, I mean to retire, where Nobody will have heard about…
Lifesaving Poems: Esther Morgan’s ‘Avocados’
I heard Michael Symmons Roberts give a magisterial reading from his book Drysalter recently. It was exemplary on so many levels, not…
Lifesaving Poems: Adrienne Rich’s ‘In the Wake of Home’
In 1991 I made the decision to teach part-time so that I could put poetry more at the centre of…
Lifesaving Poems: Rose Cook’s ‘A Poem for Someone Who is Juggling Her Life’
A Poem for Someone Who is Juggling Her Life This is a poem for someonewho is juggling her life.Be still…
Lifesaving Poems: Christopher North’s ‘The Dog’
Occasionally the entrance of a poem into your life is a combination of a series of tiny events, each of…
Lifesaving Poems: Adrian Mitchell’s ‘Goodbye’
As I said the other day, Geoffrey Summerfield’s Worlds is one of the most important books in my life. As I…
Lifesaving Poems: Riddle 7 (The Exeter Book)
Sometime in 1997 I went to hear Kevin Crossley-Holland give a reading at Exeter Central Library. I’d heard he was…
Lifesaving Poems: Dave Smith’s ‘Reading the Books Our Children Have Written’
I once heard Stephen Knight say ‘If I am reading well then I am writing well.’ It was a Q…
Lifesaving Poems: Edwin Morgan’s ‘One Cigarette’
One CigaretteNo smoke without you, my fire.After you left,your cigarette glowed on in my ashtrayand sent up a long thread…
Lifesaving Poems: Robert Lowell’s ‘Epilogue’
I became interested in Robert Lowell’s poetry because of the criticism of Seamus Heaney. I had tried reading him before,…
Lifesaving Poems: Ted Hughes’s ‘Wind’
Wind This house has been far out at sea all night,The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,Winds stampeding the…
Lifesaving Poems: Tom Paulin’s ‘A Lyric Afterwards’
‘A Lyric Afterwards’ was the poem in which I finally got Tom Paulin. I had been given a tape of him…
Lifesaving Poems: Paul Muldoon’s ‘Paris’
I love watching poets having fun. Think of Don Paterson shooting the breeze with Bill Herbert in the South Bank…
Lifesaving Poems 