When I am Asked

When I am Asked When I am asked    how I began writing poems,    I talk about the indifference of nature.    … More

God’s Grief

God’s Grief Great parentwho must have started outwith such high hopes.What magnitude of suffering,the immensity of guilt,the staggering despair.A mind … More

Open letter to Arthur Frank (on reading At the Will of the Body)

Dear Arthur Frank I’m writing to say thank you for your extraordinary book At the Will of the Body. It is … More

Lifesaving Poems: Sean O’Brien’s ‘Before’

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

Tired, but

I am tired. Though I write from a place of privilege and of safety, I am tired. Tired of feeling … More

Courage

  Courage It is in the small things we see it. The child’s first step, as awesome as an earthquake. … More

We never keep to the present

    We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found … More

Living in the layers

  The Layers I have walked through many lives, some of them my own, and I am not who I … More

On the Edge

  On the Edge After your mother dies, you will learn to live on the edge of life, to brace … More

A quiet moment

  I can’t be alone in experiencing the coronavirus crisis and resulting lockdown as something of an infringement on my … More

The wonder is

  The washing never gets done. The furnace never gets heated. Books never get read. Life is never completed. Life … More

Crashing out

My concentration has not been all that it might have been recently. Loved ones are suffering. Some with this thing, … More

Practice

Practice To weep unbidden, to wake at night in order to weep, to wait for the whisker on the face … More

Any Common Desolation

Any Common Desolation can be enough to make you look upat the yellowed leaves of the apple tree, the fewthat … More

Another Loss to Stop For

  Another Loss to Stop For   Against such cold and mercurial mornings, watch the wind whirl one leaf across … More

Empathy and New Year

Empathy and New Year A notion like that of empathy inspires great distrust in us, because it connotes a further … More

Goodbye to being a poet

For reasons I cannot go into here, I am finishing 2019 in a tired frame of mind. (I am not … More

Who are you influencing?

In Mind in Society, his seminal book on learning and thinking, the Russian philosopher and psychologist Lev Vygotsky said this: … More