The how of it

A little taster for you. This is an essay from my forthcoming book Deck Shoes. – I was having … More

The Afterlife has arrived

– –for Peter and Amanda Carpenter Yesterday a miraculous thing happened. I took delivery of a box containing copies … More

As the holiday season continues I repost this list of various found poems that I have made over the … More

There isn’t much left to be done. The proof reading, the book blurbs (they take longer than the poems), the … More

Some of you will have seen this blog post before. It is a taster of some of the contents … More

I think I am done. I think. I think, therefore I am done? I think I am. No doubt there … More

I have been doing the proofs to my new books. And I am scared. Scared that I have got it … More

‘What are you doing?’ says the book. ‘Nothing.’ ‘Doesn’t look like it.’ ‘Listening to the cricket,’ if you must know. … More

Poems hatch Poems hatch from memory, fantasy, the need to communicate with the living, the dead, the unborn. Poems come … More

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the ‘poets I go back to’ idea, that I first came across in … More

Dear James (may I call you James?) Though it’s been a while (at least ten years, maybe more) it feels as … More

This is the time of year when I traditionally think of Nick. Nick lived with us in our house in … More

I have been reading Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It For Life recently. In it she asks … More

I have carried it with me each day, that sense of shame about the fact that I write, that it … More

About a month before my friend Pammy died, she said something that may have permanently changed me. We had … More

Dear Mark I am sorry it has taken so long to getting round to writing to you, not least because … More

I was saddened to hear of the death of the Australian poet Les Murray yesterday. In the autumn of 1997, … More

I have been thinking a lot about habits recently. The unconscious, unthinking ones which, as Sylvia Plath said about words, … More