Life Begins With Cancer

This is the recording of my reading ‘Life Begins With Cancer’, recorded at the Greenbelt Festival on Sunday 25th August, … More

Waiting to be picked

If you’re not enough without the gold medal, you’ll never be enough with it. – John Candy, Cool Runnings I did not … More

Things I Learned at University How to bike on cobblestones and where to signal right. How to walk through doors … More

In the spring of 1998 I wrote to Seamus Heaney. I asked him to consider writing a Foreword to the … More

A year ago I went to hear Clare Best read from her extraordinary book Excisions (Waterloo Press, 2011). Clare … More

I met Evangeline Paterson once, in the early Nineties, at a workshop in London. Rupert Loydell suggested I went as … More

Emily Riall will be a new name to many readers of this blog. She was a fine young poet … More

A Poem for Someone Who is Juggling Her Life This is a poem for someonewho is juggling her life.Be still … More

One CigaretteNo smoke without you, my fire.After you left,your cigarette glowed on in my ashtrayand sent up a long thread … More

This is What I Wanted to Sign Off With You know what I’m like when I`m sick: I’d sooner curse … More

W.H. Auden once said that writers should always be honest, even about their prejudices. So here is my confession: when … More

The Journey One day you finally knewwhat you had to do, and began,though the voices around youkept shoutingtheir bad advice–though … More

In September 2006 my treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma came to an end. I was not told I was officially in … More

To safe and almost universal silence I published How Far From Here is Home? (Stride) a few days before Christmas in … More

Atlas There is a kind of love called maintenanceWhich stores the WD40 and knows when to use it; Which checks … More

When I began to recover from my treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in 2006 this lovely article about Nick Drake’s Northern … More

Colin Mallett, Sculptor The poets I go back to This article first appeared in the North magazine, in November 2007. … More

For the last nine years at the end of the first week in July I have been saying goodbye to … More