Gaza Advent 2: Palestine Still Lives, by Sarah al Bohassi

The second poem in our Gaza Advent series is by Sarah al Bohassi. Palestine Still Lives, by Sarah al Bohassi … More

Gaza Advent 1: Detaining a poem, by Dareen Tatour

Welcome to this series of Gaza Advent blog posts. Every Sunday during Advent I will post a link to a … More

Gaza Advent – a new series of blog posts starting tomorrow

Starting tomorrow, to mark the season of Advent, a new blog series celebrating the work of poets from Gaza and … More

This was Canada

I was listening to Radio 4 the other day. (You might think this unremarkable, but it was. I still have … More

This is writing!

The occupational hazard of going to things where other writers are also present is that they will always at some … More

I blame the dead

We have been to a thing. Breaking with this blog’s tradition of oblique references to low-level gossip and self-recrimination at … More

A step from me

In August last year I wrote about Tom Paulin’s poem of hurt and slow healing ‘A Lyric Afterwards’. It wasn’t … More

On being useless at social media

A colleague of mine said to me at the end of a lecture the other day that she wished I … More

On not being on the radio

A lovely radio producer, whom I shall call Julian, emailed me to ask if I would like to talk on … More

Birdsong

This morning, as on every morning for the last two weeks, the wood was loud with birdsong. I heard robin, … More

When you can’t, it’s impossible

I can’t write poems in recent weeks either. It’s not the first time it’s happened. And it’s not worth going … More

And The Telephone Church

In the late Eighties and early Nineties I spent a lot of time in the company of my friend Richard … More

Timorous or bold

Timorous or bold are the first three words of Seamus Heaney’s famous (to me) ‘Elegy’ for Robert Lowell. They’ve been … More

‘I hate this time of year’

Photo credit: Andrew Rumsey This, from a person I have met a handful of times, our dogs nosing each other … More

Uniformed comedians

I’ve been saying Tom Paulin’s line about ‘uniformed comedians’ a lot this summer. I don’t really want to go into … More

On boarding schools and cancer

Two big stories in the media this week, neither of which I wanted to write about, but which now seem … 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

On having my books in one room

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