It is summer for months

It Is Summer for Months Clothes are skimpy and tans are got without flight bags. We saunter beside a … More

How to attend a poetry reading

Sometime in the early Nineties I did a very brave thing. I took myself to a poetry reading. I went … More

Now that we have finally had one in the UK, I found myself wondering recently how many of my Lifesaving Poems choices … More

I’m grateful to you, you see. I wanted to tell you. –Raymond Carver (‘For Tess’) A kind, wise man once … More

The Only Son at the Fish ‘n’ Chip Shop He lived with his mother till he was forty-five … More

Rondeau Redouble There is so little left. The room is bare. She’ll strip his sheets and blankets by and … More

Wind This house has been far out at sea all night,The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,Winds stampeding the … More

Some of my favourite poetry books of all time are anthologies. Not the headline selections everybody has (and has to … More

One of the pleasures of being alive is reading John Ash. Think of a prize-winning poet, someone you think of … More

I have written before that there are a wide range of reasons for including the poems I have in my … More

I have just come back from the Greenbelt Festival where I was delighted to give a talk about writing poetry … More

On the Impossibility of Staying Alive They have found a new moon; it stands on my shoulder. They call it … More

It is nearly twenty years since I bought Peter Sansom’s Writing Poems. Among that wonderful book’s many delights I found … More

In my last blog post I wrote about the importance of following one’s nose in terms of developing a taste … More

I was struck by a remark of Seamus Heaney in an interview he gave some years ago now. He was … More