The first thing I do when a new copy of The North, Rialto or Smiths Knoll lands on the doormat…
Lifesaving Poems: Peter Carpenter’s ‘Nightwatchman’
I met Peter Carpenter in the summer of 2001 at the Arvon Foundation’s Totleigh Barton writing centre. I was at…
On Riddance
Riddance is published today. It is my fourth full-length collection of poems and my third with Worple Press. You can…
Lifesaving Poems: James Tate’s ‘I am a Finn’
I Am a Finn I am standing in the post office, about to mail a package back to Minnesota, to…
Lifesaving Poems: Seamus Heaney’s ‘Night Drive’
Night Drive The smells of ordinarinessWere new on the night drive through France;Rain and hay and woods on the airMade…
12 Ways to Practice Writing Poems
I have just come back from the Greenbelt Festival where I was delighted to give a talk about writing poetry…
On Radiotherapy
This week six years ago I began the course of radiotherapy which was to mark the final chapter of my…
Lifesaving Poems: Mandy Sutter’s ‘Caring for the Environment’
In 1991 I made the decision to spend more of my time concentrating on the thing that fulfilled me the…
Lifesaving Poems: Ian McMillan’s ‘On The Impossibility of Staying Alive’
On the Impossibility of Staying Alive They have found a new moon; it stands on my shoulder. They call it…
Lifesaving Poems: Thom Gunn’s ‘Autobiography’
AutobiographyThe sniff of the real, that’swhat I’d want to get how it feltto sit on ParliamentHill on a May eveningstudying…
Lifesaving Poems: Michael Laskey’s ‘Bike’
Now that we in Britain have started to think of ourselves as the greatest cycling nation since dinosaurs roamed the…
Riddance
On Valentine’s Day, 2006, I was was formally diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a cancer of the lymphatic system. Riddance is…
Lifesaving Poems: Rutger Kopland’s ‘I Cavalli di Leonardo’
I was sad to read yesterday via Twitter that the leading Dutch poet Rutger Kopland has died, aged 77. He…
Lifesaving Poems: Robert Pinsky’s ‘Song of Reasons’
It is nearly twenty years since I bought Peter Sansom’s Writing Poems. Among that wonderful book’s many delights I found…
Originally posted on Lifesaving Poems:
For the last nine years at the end of the first week in July I have…
Life After Chemo
The oddest phase of my experience of cancer six years ago was the period of time after my chemotherapy treatment…
Lifesaving Poems: Jean Sprackland’s ‘The Birkdale Nightingale’
I met Jean Sprackland in 2000, somewhere in the bowels of the Poetry Society in London. We were meeting to…
Lifesaving Poems: Stephen Berg’s ‘Eating Outside’
Above the desk where I am writing this is a shelf on which sits more than a yard of poetry…
Lifesaving Poems 