Lifesaving Poems: Adrienne Rich’s ‘In the Wake of Home’

In 1991 I made the decision to teach part-time so that I could put poetry more at the centre of … More

Lifesaving Poems: Adrian Mitchell’s ‘Goodbye’

As I said the other day, Geoffrey Summerfield’s Worlds is one of the most important books in my life. As I … More

Sometime in 1997 I went to hear Kevin Crossley-Holland give a reading at Exeter Central Library. I’d heard he was … More

Who? Who is that child I see wandering, wandering down by the side of the quivering stream? Why does … More

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

In 2007 Sue Dymoke, Andrew Lambirth and I got together and decided we were going to apply to the ESRC … More

I came across Michael Symmons Roberts‘s ‘Ultramarine’ during a stint as poetry editor for Third Way magazine. Like nearly everything … More

I want to live – Sharon Olds The most intense reading group I ever belonged to wasn’t really a reading … More

I I first came across e e cummings’s ‘in Just’ in an anthology, Wordscapes, edited by Barry Maybury (OUP, 1971). … More

I first encountered Siân Hughes‘s poems sitting around a table with some talented teenage poets at the Arvon Foundation‘s writing … More

As I say in my previous blog post, I owe my knowledge of ‘8.06 p.m. June 10th 1970’ to the … More

I first came across ‘Birth of the Foal’ at the recommendation of the great Cliff Yates. He told me he’d been … More

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

I came across ‘Elegy for Jane’ having found poems by Theodore Roethke in Ted Hughes’ classic anthology of poems and … More

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

The Picnic It is the picnic with Ruth in the spring. Ruth was third on my list of seven girls … More