Open call for guest blog posts celebrating the life and work of James Schuyler This November, we celebrate the centenary … More
Tag: Reading Poetry
What you read in 2022
Here are the blog posts from 2022 that you read most often Lifesaving Lines: The Death of Fred Clifton, by … More
UCU Strike: a list of poems about work
Today was not a normal day of work for me. Instead of teaching my amazing students, I chose to participate … More
Not much
What’s been happening? Well, not much. Which is another, deflecting, way of saying quite a lot, actually. So much that … More
Lifesaving Lines: Pobble, by Heather Trickey
Heather Trickey was a social research scientist, charity worker, Quaker and poet. In 2020, during the first Covid lockdown, she … More
Lifesaving Lines: The Job of Paradise, by Roger Robinson
My personal poetry highlight of the summer was listening to Roger Robinson read and be in conversation with Pádraig Ó … More
Lifesaving Lines: History, by Tomaž Šalamun
The other day I bumped into Tomaž Å alamun. I was enjoying the last few hours of walking around Ljubljana, took … More
A new review of Lifesaving Poems… from 2015
A huge shout out and massive thank you to Maria Taylor and her wonderful Commonplace blog, where yesterday I discovered … More
Lifesaving Lines: “Still Do I Keep My Look, My Identity…”, by Gwendolyn Brooks
It was the dying of the light of my time on Twitter. Days when I miss it, I think of … More
Lifesaving Lines: An October Salmon, by Ted Hughes
I walked into the middle of a Ted Hughes poem the other week. An early morning dog walk, like any … More
Lifesaving Lines: The Trees, by Philip Larkin
Early May. Sitting in the bay window upstairs at Cricklewood revising for finals. My pink vest and purple jeans phase. … More
More places of hope
I said here a couple of years ago that Natalie Jabbar’s blog of curated poems each April is like a … More
Lifesaving Lines: Edge, by Sylvia Plath
But first came Plath. After Ursuala Le Guin, the only female author we studied (OK – Jane Austen). Her name … More
Lifesaving Lines: Spring, by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Our tiny minds blown by ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, ‘Spelt From Sibyl’s Leaves’ and ‘As Kingfisher’s Catch Fire’, we … More
Lifesaving Lines: The Bluet, by James Schuyler
On a spring day as far from ‘late in dour October’ it would be harder to imagine, James Schuyler’s The … More
Lifesaving Lines: The Death of Fred Clifton, by Lucille Clifton
So this is a bit spooky. All week I had in mind these marvellous final words from Lucille Clifton’s poem … More
Lifesaving Lines: Stone, I Presume, by Ian Mcmillan
For several weeks before Christmas I had these words from Ian McMillan’s peerless ‘Stone, I Presume’ rattling around my head. … More
Not exactly good riddance
Just a few hours left of 2021. Time to reflect on what this year has been. Until a week or … More