The woman at the workshop

I am at a thing. Not a famous thing, but an important one nevertheless. People are there, people you and … More

Poetry and illness

Medicine The black hair of my Chinese doctor gleams like combed ink as he leans over his desk, with quick … More

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

The most immediate and forthright analysis of a poem I have seen at any poetry workshop occurred as I passed … More

These are the most read Lifesaving Poems posts of 2013. Mary Oliver, ‘The Journey’ I first read this on … More

Earlier this year I ran a Poetry School course about poetry and health called Written on the Body. It was … More

I began writing the Lifesaving Poems series of blog posts in May 2010. The idea was to celebrate the poems … More

The chances are, more of us are mortal than have multiple orgasms -Violet Weingarten, Intimations of Mortality When I was diagnosed … More

Riddance is published today. It is my fourth full-length collection of poems and my third with Worple Press. You can … More

I was astonished to find in an old diary today that by 8 March 2006, less than one month after … More

I was struck by a remark of Seamus Heaney in an interview he gave some years ago now. He was … More