Lifesaving Poems: e e cummings’s ‘in Just’

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

Lifesaving Poems: Siân Hughes’s ‘Results’

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